The Editor

RALPH PITE is Professor of English at the University of Bristol,

where he has taught since 2007 and the Director of the
Institute of Advanced Studies. He is the author of Thomas
Hardy: The Guarded Life, Hardy’s Geography: Wessex and
the Regional Novel, and The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s
Presence in English Romantic Poetry. His edited or co-edited
works include Romans and Romantics, W. S. Graham:
Speaking Towards You, Lives of the Great Romantics:
Coleridge, and Dante, The Divine Comedy: The Vision of
Dante.
 A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION

Thomas Hardy
JUDE THE OBSCURE

AN AUTHORITATIVE TEXT
BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS
CRITICISM
THIRD EDITION

Edited by
RALPH PITE
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
 Contents

Cover
About the Editor
Title Page
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Third Edition

The Text of Jude the Obscure

A map of the Wessex of the novels (1895)
Contents of Jude the Obscure
Preface to the First Edition (1895)
Postscript (1912)
Jude the Obscure

Backgrounds and Contexts

COMPOSITION, PUBLICATION, AND TEXT

John Paterson • [Hardy’s Change of Direction]

Robert C. Slack • [Hardy’s Revisions]
HARDY’S NONFICTIONAL WRITINGS

From Hardy’s Autobiography

Comments from Hardy’s Letters
The Tree of Knowledge
 From Candour in English Fiction
HARDY’S POEMS

To a Lady
Thoughts of Phena
At an Inn
In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury
In Tenebris II
A Thunderstorm in Town
The Recalcitrants
Midnight on the Great Western
The Young Glass-Stainer
The Son’s Portrait
Childhood among the Ferns
LOCALE

Norman Page • Settings and Sources

Map: Valters’ Plan of Oxford (1891)

Criticism
CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION

William Dean Howells • From Harper’s Weekly

(December 7, 1895)
Margaret Oliphant • From Blackwood’s Magazine
(January 1896)
Edmund Gosse • From Cosmopolis (January 1896)
D. F. Hannigan • From Westminster Review (January
1896)
W. W. How, Bishop of Wakefield • Letter to the
Yorkshire Post (June 9, 1896)
Havelock Ellis • From Savoy Magazine (October 1896)
D. H. Lawrence • [Male and Female] (1914)
MODERN CRITICISM

Mary Jacobus • From ‘Sue the Obscure’ (1975)

Penny Boumelha • [A “Double Tragedy”] (1982)
J. B. Bullen • [Contemporary Realist Painting in Jude
the Obscure] (1986)
 F. B. Pinion • [Jude the Obscure as Autobiography]
(1986)
Elaine Showalter • [A “Biological Trap”] (1986)
John Goode • [Place, the Social Order, and Phillotson]
(1988)
Marjorie Garson • [Jude’s Idealism] (1991)
Victor Luftig • [Jude and Sue: “True Comrades”] (1993)
John R. Doheny • [In Defence of Arabella] (1998)
Michael Hollington • [“Progress” and Disruption: Little
Father Time] (2004)
Simon Gatrell • From Coloured Clothes (2011)

Thomas Hardy: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography
Copyright
Norton Critical Editions: Victorian Era
 Preface to the First Edition

Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, is one of the greatest

works of late Victorian literature; but it is also something
more than that. With courage and sensitivity, Hardy
explores some of the most significant social issues of his
time—and not only of his time. The intensity of his response
to the questions debated and dramatized in the novel
derives from their importance being at the same time public
and personal. That some at least of his contemporaries
recognized the force and originality of its propagandist
elements is attested by the comment of one of his earliest
critics, an anonymous writer in the Saturday Review
(February 8, 1896): after quoting from the scene describing
the death of Jude, he declares: “That is the voice of the
educated proletarian, speaking more distinctly than it has
ever spoken before in English literature.” And that these
qualities are still recognized is suggested by Kate Millett’s
description of the novel as “a significant contribution to the
literature of the sexual revolution” (Sexual Politics [New
York, 1970], p. 133). It happens, of course, that these two
critics, three generations apart, single out quite different
facets of Hardy’s novel for commendation; and, indeed it is
difficult to think of another novel of the period in which such
a diversity of vital social and intellectual questions—the
class system, inequality of educational opportunity,
urbanization and the drift to the towns, and above all
questions of marriage and sexual morality—are so
vigorously ventilated.
Jude the Obscure occupied Hardy for longer than any of
its predecessors. According to the preface he wrote for the
first edition, he began making notes in 1887, presumably
soon after he had finished The Woodlanders and before Tess
of the d’Urbervilles was started; in 1890 he “jotted down”
the “scheme” of the novel, by which he probably meant an
outline of the plot as it was at first conceived; in October
1892 he visited Great Fawley, the Berkshire village where
his grandmother had lived and which is the prototype of
“Marygreen” in the novel; during 1892–93 he wrote the
story “in outline,” and also visited Oxford, on which
“Christminster” is based; and in 1893–94 the novel was
written “at full length.” The date at the end of the
manuscript is March 1895. Like nearly all of Hardy’s novels,
Jude the Obscure was originally published as a serial,
appearing simultaneously in England and America in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 to
November 1895. As the preface admits, the serial version
was “abridged and modified” from what Hardy had written;
these changes, which can be traced in the manuscript and
involved (in R. L. Purdy’s words) an “amazing sacrifice of art
and credibility,” were made in response to objections from
the editor of the magazine, who had protested that the
treatment of Jude’s relationships with Arabella and Sue was
unsuitable for a family periodical. According to J. Henry
Harper, Hardy had originally assured his editor that the new
novel “would be a tale that could not offend the most
fastidious maiden”; but as work progressed he found himself
obliged to admit that “the development of the story was
carrying him into unexpected fields,” and he was “afraid to
predict its future trend.” What had happened, in fact, was
that a novel about the quest for an education had, in the
process of composition, turned into a novel about the much
more inflammatory topics of sex and marriage. Study of the
manuscript shows that Hardy’s enforced bowdlerization
involved not only drastic modifications to the action of the
novel, but numerous minor verbal revisions—for example,
“couch” was substituted at one point for “bed,” and
“shaking hands” for “kissing.”
In November 1895 Jude appeared in volume form in
London and New York, the cuts and revisions made for serial
publication having been largely (though not entirely)
eliminated by restoration of the original version. The book
was published in a single volume at a relatively low price; it
thus broke with the Victorian tradition of the expensive
three-volume novel, the format in which most of Hardy’s
work had appeared. Hardy revised Jude for further editions
in 1903 and 1912; the latter revision, for the Wessex Edition
of his work, also added an important postscript to the
preface. This final revision is generally accepted as the
definitive text, representing as it does Hardy’s final
intentions and incorporating numerous corrections
prompted by his minute and painstaking scrutiny of the
earlier texts. It has been used as the basis of the present
edition. I have collated it with the first English edition (dated
1896 on the title page, though actually published, as noted
above, before the end of 1895), and have when necessary
made reference to the manuscript and the 1903 revision.
Hardy’s 1912 postscript to the preface, which is actually
much longer than the original preface, refers modestly to “a
few verbal corrections”; but this is a characteristically
Hardyan understatement, and, as Robert C. Slack has
shown, there are over two hundred variants between the
1903 and 1912 texts. Though nearly all are of minor
significance, they indicate that Hardy, even after his
abandonment of fiction, was sufficiently interested in his
novel to subject it to a very close revision. A few errors,
mainly affecting punctuation, eluded his careful
proofreading; and some of them have persisted in modern
editions. In the present text, twenty obvious misprints have
been silently corrected. The textual history of this novel,
including an account of the surviving manuscript, of the
pressure brought to bear upon Hardy to bowdlerize his
novel, and of the subsequent restoration and revisions, is
described in this edition through a series of extracts by
Hardy himself, his contemporaries, and modern scholars.
The reception of Jude by late-Victorian reviewers in
England and America was characterized by vehement,
though not unanimous, disapproval. For one lady critic, it
was “almost the worst book I have ever read,” dealing as it
did with the behavior of “pigs—animal and human”; Hardy
was accused of attacking “the fundamental institutions of
society” and “all the obligations and relations of life which
most people hold sacred,” and of “wallowing in the mire”
and “dabbling in beastliness and putrefaction”; an American
reviewer called it “a moral monstrosity” and “a stream of
indecency”; one British critic observed that it was “steeped
in sex”; and another lady reviewer urged Hardy to avoid
coarseness and to return to “the sweet smell of woods and
fields.” A selection of the more important of the
contemporary reviews, favorable and otherwise, is given in
this book. Hardy’s autobiography, relevant extracts from
which are reproduced, cites other responses, ranging from
the laudatory to the ludicrous, and records some of his own
reactions to this publicity. By the end of his life, the qualities
of his novel had won due recognition: one obituary notice
called it “the finest sex-novel ever written,” and in the
following years Ford Madox Ford and others expressed the
view that it is Hardy’s masterpiece. Recognition was
international: before his death it had been translated into
German, French, Japanese, and other languages, and since
then it has appeared in Italian, Russian, Chinese, and many
more. For many modern critics it represents not only the
summit of Hardy’s achievement in the novel but the
beginning of an important tradition in modern British fiction,
as the first major novel with a working class hero.
In writing Jude the Obscure Hardy drew heavily (perhaps,
indeed, more heavily than ever before) on his personal
experiences and passionate convictions: this much is clear
in spite of his firm declarations to the contrary. I have
sought to illuminate some of the sources of the novel by
means of extracts from contemporary materials: most
importantly, from Hardy’s own letters, diaries, poems and
journalistic writings. A further section of material presents
modern interpretations and evaluations of the novel from
various critical standpoints.
Jude is a highly allusive novel, containing abundant
evidence of Hardy’s eclectic reading and specialized
interests. Annotation has therefore necessarily been
somewhat fuller than usual, and a glance at the notes brings
home rather strikingly certain aspects of Hardy’s literary
and intellectual equipment. There are, for example, some
fifty allusions to the Bible, and thirty to the Greek and Latin
classics; about fifty dialect words and expressions;
numerous technical terms of architecture; and a wide range
of references to English authors from Shakespeare, Milton,
and Bunyan to poets of Hardy’s own time such as Browning
and Swinburne, as well as to French and German authors. I
have tried not only to explain any expression or reference
that might puzzle the student, but also on occasion to
suggest some of the personal and structural undercurrents
of the novel.
In the footnotes, “Life” indicates F. E. Hardy’s The Life of
Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (single-volume edition, London,
1962); references to “Hardy’s manuscript” are to the
manuscript of Jude the Obscure now in the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge.
In preparing and annotating the text, I have been
indebted to several previous editors of this novel, especially
P. N. Furbank, Robert B. Heilman, and F. R. Southerington, as
well as to Robert C. Slack’s unpublished variorum edition.
My thanks are also due to the director and staff of the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for allowing me access to
Hardy’s manuscript, and to Cambridge University Library for
providing a copy of an 1891 Plan of Oxford.
NORMAN PAGE
 Preface to the Third Edition

In preparing this Third Edition, I have been made

increasingly aware of the excellence of Norman Page’s work
on the first and second editions. This edition continues to be
in large part his work. My principal concern has been to
update the “Modern Criticism” section and the “Selected
Bibliography,” in order to reflect as far as possible the
breadth of responses which Hardy’s final novel has received
over the last fifiteen years. The third and fourth members of
the quadrille, Arabella and Phillotson, have become routes
into the novel from new and revealing perspectives;
psychogeography has informed readings of Hardy’s
locations; D. H. Lawrence’s view of Sue has become less
normative than it once was, appearing instead as one
element in the complex of gender stereotypes and debates
over sexuality that the novel seeks to analyze. On-line
access to journal articles is often easier at present than
access to academic books, so I have included here more
extracts from books than from articles, hoping to redress the
balance a little. There are a number of additional footnotes,
drawing out further the web of Hardy’s allusions and
seeking to indicate the material culture in which he embeds
the story. I have chosen a different selection of poems, ones
that emphasize the biographical contexts from which some
parts of the novel arose.
RALPH PITE
 The Text of
JUDE THE OBSCURE
Hardy prepared this map of “Wessex,” his fictional territory,
in 1895 for a collected edition of his works. Redrawn for this
NCE by Adrian Kitzinger. Actual names are in solid capitals:
e.g., BRISTOL, BATH, STONEHENGE. The others are fictitious,
the following being the most important in Jude the Obscure:

“Marygreen” corresponds to Great Fawley (a village in

Berkshire)
“Christminster” corresponds to Oxford
“Aldbrickham” corresponds to Reading
“Melchester” corresponds to Salisbury
“Shaston” corresponds to Shaftesbury
“Alfredston” corresponds to Wantage
“Kennetbridge” corresponds to Newbury
Note that the scale of Hardy’s fictional world is small:
from “Christminster” to “Melchester,” for instance, is only
about seventy miles.
Contents of Jude the Obscure
Preface to the First Edition (1895)
Postscript (1912)

Part First
At Marygreen, 1–11

Part Second
At Christminster, 1–7

Part Third
At Melchester, 1–10

Part Fourth
At Shaston, 1–6

Part Fifth
At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere, 1–8

Part Sixth
At Christminster Again, 1–11
 Preface to the First Edition
The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape
has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical
publication) is briefly as follows. The scheme was jotted
down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onwards, some
of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a
woman1 in the former year. The scenes were revisited in
October 1892; the narrative was written in outline in 1892
and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears,
from August 1893 onwards into the next year; the whole,
with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of
the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a serial
story in Harper’s Magazine at the end of November 1894,
and was continued in monthly parts.
But, as in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the
magazine version was for various reasons an abridged and
modified one, the present edition being the first in which the
whole appears as originally written. And in the difficulty of
coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale
was issued under a provisional name, two such titles having,
in fact, been successively adopted.2 The present and final
title, deemed on the whole the best, was one of the earliest
thought of.
For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full
age; which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and
fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of
the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a
mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and
spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not
aware that there is anything in the handling to which
exception can be taken.
 Like former productions of this pen, Jude the Obscure is
simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a
series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of
their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence
or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first
moment.
August 1895
 Postscript
The issue of this book sixteen years ago, with the
explanatory Preface given above, was followed by
unexpected incidents, and one can now look back for a
moment at what happened. Within a day or two of its
publication the reviewers pronounced upon it in tones to
which the reception of Tess of the d’Urbervilles bore no
comparison, though there were two or three dissentients
from the chorus. This salutation of the story in England was
instantly cabled to America, and the music was reinforced
on that side of the Atlantic in a shrill crescendo.
In my own eyes the sad feature of the attack was that the
greater part of the story—that which presented the
shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been
more especially, and indeed almost exclusively, the part of
interest to myself—was practically ignored by the adverse
press of the two countries; the while that some twenty or
thirty pages of sorry detail deemed necessary to complete
the narrative, and show the antitheses in Jude’s life, were
almost the sole portions read and regarded. And curiously
enough, a reprint the next year of a fantastic tale that had
been published in a family paper some time before,3 drew
down upon my head a continuation of the same sort of
invective from several quarters.
So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude’s career as a
book. After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune
was to be burnt by a bishop4—probably in his despair at not
being able to burn me.
 Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work—
austere in its treatment of a difficult subject—as if the writer
had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to
be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter
ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could
discover being its effect on myself—the experience
completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.
One incident among many arising from the storm of
words was that an American man of letters, who did not
whitewash his own morals informed me that, having bought
a copy of the book on the strength of the shocked criticisms,
he read on and on, wondering when the harmfulness was
going to begin, and at last flung it across the room with
execrations at having been induced by the rascally
reviewers to waste a dollar-and-half on what he was pleased
to call ‘a religious and ethical treatise.’
I sympathized with him, and assured him honestly that
the misrepresentations had been no collusive trick of mine
to increase my circulation among the subscribers to the
papers in question.
Then there was the case of the lady5 who having
shuddered at the book in an influential article bearing
intermediate headlines of horror, and printed in a world-read
journal, wrote to me shortly afterwards that it was her desire
to make my acquaintance.
To return, however, to the book itself. The marriage laws
being used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale,
and its general drift on the domestic side tending to show
that, in Diderot’s6 words, the civil law should be only the
enunciation of the law of nature (a statement that requires
some qualification, by the way), I have been charged since
1895 with a large responsibility in this country for the
present ‘shop-soiled’ condition of the marriage theme (as a
learned writer characterized it the other day). I do not know.
My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is
now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it
becomes a cruelty to either of the parties—being then
essentially and morally no marriage—and it seemed a good
foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as
a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that
was universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic,
Aristotelian7 qualities might be found therein.
The difficulties down to twenty or thirty years back of
acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means
were used in the same way; though I was informed that
some readers thought these episodes an attack on
venerable institutions, and that when Ruskin College8 was
subsequently founded it should have been called the
College of Jude the Obscure.
Artistic effort always pays heavily for finding its tragedies
in the forced adaptation of human instincts to rusty and
irksome moulds that do not fit them. To do Bludyer9 and the
conflagratory bishop justice, what they meant seems to
have been only this: ‘We Britons hate ideas, and we are
going to live up to that privilege of our native country. Your
picture may not show the untrue, or the uncommon, or even
be contrary to the canons of art; but it is not the view of life
that we who thrive on conventions can permit to be
painted.’
But what did it matter. As for the matrimonial scenes, in
spite of their ‘touching the spot,’ and the screaming of a
poor lady in Blackwood that there was an unholy anti-
marriage league afoot,10 the famous contract—sacrament I
mean—is doing fairly well still, and people marry and give in
what may or may not be true marriage as light-heartedly as
ever. The author has even been reproached by some
earnest correspondents that he has left the question where
he found it, and has not pointed the way to a much-needed
reform.
After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in
Germany, an experienced reviewer of that country informed
the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first
delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into
notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the
feminist movement—the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl—the
intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern
conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does
not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow
marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior
people because they are licensed to be loved on the
premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the
newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not
done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed
her to break down at the end.
Whether this assurance is borne out by dates I cannot
say. Nor am I able, across the gap of years since the
production of the novel, to exercise more criticism upon it of
a general kind than extends to a few verbal corrections,
whatever, good or bad, it may contain. And no doubt there
can be more in a book than the author consciously put
there, which will help either to its profit or to its
disadvantage as the case may be.
T. H.
April 1912

1. Probably Hardy’s cousin, Tryphena Sparks. See his poem “Thoughts of Phena
at News of her Death,” here.
2. The serial version began as The Simpletons but changed after the first
installment to Hearts Insurgent.
3. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved was serialized in the Illustrated London News
in 1892. It was published in volume form in 1897 as The Well-Beloved.
4. W. W. How, Bishop of Wakefield. See here and here.
5. Jeannette Gilder, who wrote a hostile review of the novel in The New York
World; see Life 279–80 and Hardy’s letter of July 16, 1896.
6. Denis Diderot (1713–1784), French author. The statement appears in his
Encyclopédie (1751–72).
7. The reference is to Aristotle’s treatise on literary criticism, the Poetics, in
which it is suggested that one of the effects of tragic drama is to produce a
 catharsis or “purgation” of the emotions.
8. Founded in 1899 at Oxford for the higher education of working-class men.
9. A hostile reviewer in Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848).
10. The reference is to Mrs. Margaret Oliphant’s review of the novel in
Blackwood’s Magazine under the title “The Anti-Marriage League”; see here.
 Jude the Obscure

‘The letter killeth’1

Part First: At Marygreen2

‘Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and
become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred,
and sinned, for women.… O ye men, how can it be but women should
be strong, seeing they do thus?’
—Esdras.3

I–1
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody
seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small
white tilted4 cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of
his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle
proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s
effects. For the school-house had been partly furnished by
the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was
a cottage piano5 that he had bought at an auction during
the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music.
But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired
any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a
perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.
The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who
disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till
the evening, when the new school-teacher would have
arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth
again.
The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster
himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour
before the instrument. The master had remarked that even
if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with
it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for,
since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first.
A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting
in the packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed
their chins he spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own
voice: ‘Aunt have got a great fuel-house, and it could be put
there, perhaps, till you’ve found a place to settle in, sir.’
‘A proper good notion,’ said the blacksmith.
It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s
aunt—an old maiden resident—and ask her if she would
house the piano till Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The
smith and the bailiff started to see the practicability of the
suggested shelter, and the boy and the schoolmaster were
left standing alone.
‘Sorry I am going, Jude?’ asked the latter kindly.
Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the
regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the
schoolmaster’s life, but one who had attended the night
school only during the present teacher’s term of office. The
regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood at the
present moment afar off, like certain historic disciples,6
indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand,
which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift,
and admitted that he was sorry.
 ‘So am I,’ said Mr. Phillotson.
‘Why do you go, sir?’ asked the boy.
‘Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand
my reasons, Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.’
‘I think I should now, sir.’
‘Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a
university is, and a university degree? It is the necessary
hall-mark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching.
My scheme, or dream, is to be a university graduate, and
then to be ordained. By going to live at Christminster, or
near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and if my
scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I
should have elsewhere.’
The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s7
fuel-house was dry, and eminently practicable; and she
seemed willing to give the instrument standing-room there.
It was accordingly left in the school till the evening, when
more hands would be available for removing it; and the
schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and
at nine o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of
books and other impedimenta,8 and bade his friends good-
bye.
‘I shan’t forget you, Jude,’ he said, smiling, as the cart
moved off. ‘Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to
animals and birds, and read all you can. And if ever you
come to Christminster remember you hunt me out for old
acquaintance’ sake.’
The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round
the corner by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the
draw-well at the edge of the greensward, where he had left
his buckets when he went to help his patron and teacher in
the loading. There was a quiver in his lip now, and after
opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the
frame-work, his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful
child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his
time. The well into which he was looking was as ancient as
the village itself, and from his present position appeared as
a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of
quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There
was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
hart’s-tongue fern.
He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a
whimsical boy, that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well
scores of times on a morning like this, and would never draw
there any more. ‘I’ve seen him look down into it, when he
was tired with his drawing, just as I do now, and when he
rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! But he was
too clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place like
this!’
A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The
morning was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled
itself as a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His
thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outcry:
‘Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!’9
It came from an old woman who had emerged from her
door towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage
not far off. The boy quickly waved a signal of assent, drew
the water with what was a great effort for one of his stature,
landed and emptied the big bucket into his own pair of
smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon
the well stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or
rather hamlet of Marygreen.
It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in
the lap of an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex
downs. Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably
the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely
unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered10 dwelling-
houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees
felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump-
backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped,11 had been
taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal
in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-
stones to fences, and rockeries in the flowerbeds of the
neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern
Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected
on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic
records who had run down from London and back in a day.
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green
and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the church-
yard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by
eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five
years.

I–2
Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two
brimming house-buckets of water to the cottage without
resting. Over the door was a little rectangular piece of blue
board, on which was painted in yellow letters, ‘Drusilla
Fawley, Baker.’ Within the little lead panes of the window—
this being one of the few old houses left—were five bottles
of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he
could hear an animated conversation in progress within-
doors between his great-aunt, the Drusilla of the signboard,
and some other villagers. Having seen the schoolmaster
depart, they were summing up particulars of the event, and
indulging in predictions of his future.
‘And who’s he? asked one, comparatively a stranger,
when the boy entered.
‘Well ye med12 ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-
nephew—come since you was last this way.’ The old
inhabitant who answered was a tall, gaunt woman, who
spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and gave a
phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. ‘He come
from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—
worse luck for ’n, Belinda’ (turning to the right) ‘where his
father was living, and was took wi’ the shakings for death,
and died in two days, as you know, Caroline’ (turning to the
left). ‘It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took
thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy! But
I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be
done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny
he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham.
It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?’ she
continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances
like slaps upon his face, moved aside.
The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very
good plan of Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her
indifferently) to have him with her—‘to kip ’ee company in
your loneliness, fetch water, shet the winder-shetters o’
nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.’
Miss Fawley doubted it.… ‘Why didn’t ye get the
schoolmaster to take ’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make
a scholar of ’ee,’ she continued, in frowning pleasantry. ‘I’m
sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one. The boy is crazy for
books, that he is. It runs in our family rather. His cousin Sue
is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not seen the child
for years, though she was born in this place, within these
four walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after
they were married, didn’t get a house of their own for some
year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t
go into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for
the Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one,
was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah,
that a little maid should know such changes!’
Jude, finding the general attention again centering on
himself, went out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake
provided for his breakfast. The end of his spare time had
now arrived, and emerging from the garden by getting over
the hedge at the back he pursued a path northward, till he
came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of
the upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This vast
concave was the scene of his labours for Mr. Troutham the
farmer, and he descended into the midst of it.
The brown surface of the field went right up towards the
sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that
shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The
only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last
year’s produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks
that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the fallow
by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew
whom, though once by many of his own dead family.
‘How ugly it is here!’ he murmured.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the
channellings in a piece of new corduroy,13 lending a meanly
utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations,
and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent
months, though to every clod and stone there really
attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of
songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words and of
sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first
or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness.
Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square
yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet
had been made up there between reaping and carrying.
Under the hedge which divided the field from a distant
plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would
not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest;
and in that ancient corn-field many a man had made love-
promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by
the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church
adjoining. But this neither Jude nor the rooks around him
considered. For them it was a lonely place, possessing, in
the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and in the
other that of a granary good to feed in.
The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every
few seconds used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack
the rooks left off pecking, and rose and went away on their
leisurely wings, burnished like tassets14 of mail, afterwards
wheeling back and regarding him warily, and descending to
feed at a more respectful distance.
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length
his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires.
They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did
not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They
took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends
and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in
the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often
told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they
alighted anew.
‘Poor little dears!’ said Jude, aloud. ‘You shall have some
dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer
Troutham can afford to let you have some. Eat, then, my
dear little birdies, and make a good meal!’
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil,
and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-
feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as
those lives were, they much resembled his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as
being a mean and sordid instrument, offensive both to the
birds and to himself as their friend. All at once he become
conscious of a smart blow upon his buttocks, followed by a
loud clack, which announced to his surprised senses that
the clacker had been the instrument of offence used. The
birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed
eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great
Troutham himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s
cowering frame, the clacker swinging in his hand.
 ‘So it’s “Eat, my dear birdies,” is it, young man? “Eat,
dear birdies,” indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you
say, “Eat, dear birdies,” again in a hurry! And you’ve been
idling at the school-master’s too, instead of coming here,
ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s how you earn your sixpence a day for
keeping the rooks off my corn!’
Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric,
Troutham had seized his left hand with his own left, and
swinging his slim frame round him at arm’s-length, again
struck Jude on the hind parts with the flat side of Jude’s own
rattle, till the field echoed with the blows, which were
delivered once or twice at each revolution.
‘Don’t ’ee, sir—please don’t ’ee!’ cried the whirling child,
as helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as
a hooked fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the
rick, the plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and
round him in an amazing circular race. ‘I—I—sir—only meant
that—there was a good crop in the ground—I saw ’em sow it
—and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner—and you
wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind
to ’em—O, O, O!’15
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the
farmer even more than if Jude had stoutly denied saying
anything at all; and he still smacked the whirling urchin, the
clacks of the instrument continuing to resound all across the
field and as far as the ears of distant workers—who
gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of
clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-
new church tower just behind the mist, towards the building
of which structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to
testify his love for God and man.
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and
depositing the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence
from his pocket and gave it him in payment for his day’s
work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in
one of those fields again.
 Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the
trackway weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen
enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial
scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad
for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had
wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the
parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for
life.
With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show
himself in the village, and went homeward by a roundabout
track behind a high hedge and across a pasture. Here he
beheld scores of coupled earth-worms lying half their length
on the surface of the damp ground, as they always did in
such weather at that time of the year. It was impossible to
advance in regular steps without crushing some of them at
each tread.
Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy
who could not himself bear to hurt anything. He had never
brought home a nest of young birds without lying awake in
misery half the night after, and often reinstating them and
the nest in their original place the next morning. He could
scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy
that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up
and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him
in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be
called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born
to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his
unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him
again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the
earth-worms, without killing a single one.
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny
loaf to a little girl, and when the customer was gone she
said, ‘Well, how do you come to be back here in the middle
of the morning like this?’
‘I’m turned away.’
‘What?’
 ‘Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the
rooks have a few peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—
the last I shall ever hae!’
He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.
‘Ah!’ said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she
opened upon him a lecture on how she would now have him
all the spring upon her hands doing nothing. ‘If you can’t
skeer birds, what can ye do? There! don’t ye look so
deedy!16 Farmer Troutham is not so much better than
myself, come to that. But ’tis as Job said, “Now they that are
younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would
have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.”17 His
father was my father’s journeyman, anyhow, and I must
have been a fool to let ’ee go to work for ’n, which I
shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ’ee out of mischty.’
More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there
than for dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from
that point of view, and only secondarily from a moral one.
‘Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer
Troutham planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude,
Jude, why didstn’t go off with that schoolmaster of thine to
Christminster or somewhere? But, O no—poor or’nary child
—there never was any sprawl18 on thy side of the family,
and never will be!’
‘Where is this beautiful city, aunt—this place where Mr.
Phillotson is gone to?’ asked the boy, after meditating in
silence.
‘Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster
is. Near a score of miles from here. It is a place much too
good for you ever to have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-
thinking.’
‘And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?’
‘How can I tell?’
‘Couldn’t I go to see him?’
‘Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t
ask such as that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk
in Christminster, nor folk in Christminster with we.’
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence
to be an undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a
heap of litter near the pig-sty. The fog had by this time
become more translucent, and the position of the sun could
be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat over his face,
and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the
white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought
responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he
had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care
for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty
towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got
older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and
not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you
were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he
perceived. All around you there seemed to be something
glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon
the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not
want to be a man.19
Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and
sprang up. During the remainder of the morning he helped
his aunt, and in the afternoon, when there was nothing more
to be done, he went into the village. Here he asked a man
whereabouts Christminster lay.
‘Christminster? O, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve
never bin there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a
place.’
The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction
where lay that field in which Jude had so disgraced himself.
There was something unpleasant about the coincidence for
the moment, but the fearsomeness of this fact rather
increased his curiosity about the city. The farmer had said
he was never to be seen in that field again; yet
Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one.
So, stealing out of the hamlet he descended into the same
hollow which had witnessed his punishment in the morning,
never swerving an inch from the path, and climbing up the
long and tedious ascent on the other side, till the track
joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the
ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak open
down.

I–3
Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on
either side of it, and the white road seemed to ascend and
diminish till it joined the sky. At the very top it was crossed
at right angles by a green ‘ridgeway’—the Icknield Street20
and original Roman road through the district. This ancient
track ran east and west for many miles, and down almost to
within living memory had been used for driving flocks and
herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and
overgrown.
The boy had never before strayed so far north as this
from the nestling hamlet in which he had been deposited by
the carrier from a railway station southward, one dark
evening some few months earlier, and till now he had no
suspicion that such a wide, flat, low-lying country lay so
near at hand, under the very verge of his upland world. The
whole northern semicircle between east and west, to a
distance of forty or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a
bluer, moister atmosphere, evidently, than that he breathed
up here.
Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of
reddish-gray brick and tile. It was known as the Brown
House by the people of the locality. He was about to pass it
when he perceived a ladder against the eaves; and the
reflection that the higher he got, the further he could see,
led Jude to stand and regard it. On the slope of the roof two
men were repairing the tiling. He turned into the ridgeway
and drew towards the barn.
 When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some
time he took courage, and ascended the ladder till he stood
beside them.
‘Well, my lad, and what may you want up here?’
‘I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is, if you
please.’
‘Christminster is out across there, by that clump. You can
see it—at least you can on a clear day. Ah, no, you can’t
now.’
The other tiler, glad of any kind of diversion from the
monotony of his labour, had also turned to look towards the
quarter designated. ‘You can’t often see it in weather like
this,’ he said. ‘The time I’ve noticed it is when the sun is
going down in a blaze of flame, and it looks like—I don’t
know what.’
‘The heavenly Jerusalem,’ suggested the serious urchin.
‘Ay—though I should never ha’ thought of it myself.… But
I can’t see no Christminster to-day.’
The boy strained his eyes also; yet neither could he see
the far-off city. He descended from the barn, and
abandoning Christminster with the versatility of his age he
walked along the ridge-track, looking for any natural objects
of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout. When he
repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that
the ladder was still in its place, but that the men had
finished their day’s work and gone away.
It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint
mist, but it had cleared a little except in the damper tracts
of subjacent country and along the river-courses. He
thought again of Christminster, and wished, since he had
come two or three miles from his aunt’s house on purpose,
that he could have seen for once this attractive city of which
he had been told. But even if he waited here it was hardly
likely that the air would clear before night. Yet he was loth to
leave the spot, for the northern expanse became lost to
view on retreating towards the village only a few hundred
yards.
He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the
point the men had designated, and perched himself on the
highest rung, overlying the tiles. He might not be able to
come so far as this for many days. Perhaps if he prayed, the
wish to see Christminster might be forwarded. People said
that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even
though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that
a man who had begun to build a church, and had no money
to finish it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in
by the next post. Another man tried the same experiment,
and the money did not come; but he found afterwards that
the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew. This
was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt
on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he
prayed that the mist might rise.
He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course
of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved
altogether from the northern horizon, as it had already done
elsewhere, and about a quarter of an hour before the time
of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun’s position
being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in
visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy
immediately looked back in the old direction.
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape,
points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in
transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points
showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof
slates, and other shining spots upon the spires, domes,
freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly
revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either
directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.
The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes
lost their shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished
candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to
the west, he saw that the sun had disappeared. The
foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and
near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimæras.21
He anxiously descended the ladder, and started
homewards at a run, trying not to think of giants, Herne the
Hunter, Apollyon lying in wait for Christian, or of the captain
with the bleeding hole in his forehead and the corpses round
him that remutinied every night on board the bewitched
ship.22 He knew that he had grown out of belief in these
horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and
the lights in the cottage windows, even though this was not
the home of his birth, and his great-aunt did not care much
about him.

Inside and round about that old woman’s ‘shop’ window,

with its twenty-four little panes set in leadwork, the glass of
some of them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly
see the poor penny articles exhibited within, and forming
part of a stock which a strong man could have carried, Jude
had his outer being for some long tideless time. But his
dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the
northward he was always beholding a gorgeous city—the
fancied place he had likened to the new Jerusalem, though
there was perhaps more of the painter’s imagination and
less of the diamond merchant’s in his dreams thereof than
in those of the Apocalyptic writer.23 And the city acquired a
tangibility, a permanence, and hold on his life, mainly from
the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge
and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living
there; not only so, but living among the more thoughtful and
mentally shining ones therein.
In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at
Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so
drearily there. Whenever he could get away from the
confines of the hamlet for an hour or two, which was not
often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and
strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by
the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke,
which in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.
Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that
if he ascended to the point of view after dark, or possibly
went a mile or two further, he would see the night lights of
the city. It would be necessary to come back alone, but even
that consideration did not deter him, for he could throw a
little manliness into his mood, no doubt.
The project was duly executed. It was not late when he
arrived at the place of outlook, only just after dusk; but a
black north-east sky, accompanied by a wind from the same
quarter, made the occasion dark enough. He was rewarded;
but what he saw was not the lamps in rows, as he had half
expected. No individual light was visible, only a halo or
glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens
behind it, making the light and the city seem distant but a
mile or so.
He set himself to wonder on the exact point in the glow
where the schoolmaster might be—he who never
communicated with anybody at Marygreen now; who was as
if dead to them here. In the glow he seemed to see
Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms in
Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.24
He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten
miles an hour, and the fact now came into his mind. He
parted his lips as he faced the north-east, and drew in the
wind as if it were a sweet liquor.
‘You,’ he said, addressing the breeze caressingly, ‘were in
Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating
along the streets, pulling round the weather-cocks, touching
Mr. Phillotson’s face, being breathed by him; and now you
are here, breathed by me—you, the very same.’
Suddenly there came along this wind, something towards
him—a message from the place—from some soul residing
there, it seemed. Surely it was the sound of bells, the voice
of the city, faint and musical, calling to him, ‘We are happy
here!’
He had become entirely lost to his bodily situation during
this mental leap, and only got back to it by a rough
recalling. A few yards below the brow of the hill on which he
paused a team of horses made its appearance, having
reached the place by dint of half an hour’s serpentine
progress from the bottom of the immense declivity. They
had a load of coals behind them—a fuel that could only be
got into the upland by this particular route. They were
accompanied by a carter, a second man, and a boy, who
now kicked a large stone behind one of the wheels, and
allowed the panting animals to have a long rest, while those
in charge took a flagon off the load and indulged in a drink
round.
They were elderly men, and had genial voices. Jude
addressed them, inquiring if they had come from
Christminster.
‘Heaven forbid, with this load!’ said they.
‘The place I mean is that one yonder.’ He was getting so
romantically attached to Christminster that, like a young
lover alluding to his mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning
its name again. He pointed to the light in the sky—hardly
perceptible to their older eyes.
‘Yes. There do seem a spot a bit brighter in the nor’-east
than elsewhere, though I shouldn’t ha’ noticed it myself, and
no doubt it med be Christminster.’
Here a little book of tales which Jude had tucked up under
his arm, having brought them to read on his way hither
before it grew dark, slipped and fell into the road. The carter
eyed him while he picked it up and straightened the leaves.
‘Ah, young man,’ he observed, ‘you’d have to get your
head screwed on t’other way before you could read what
they read there.’
‘Why?’ asked the boy.
 ‘O, they never look at anything that folks like we can
understand,’ the carter continued, by way of passing the
time. ‘On’y foreign tongues used in the days of the Tower of
Babel, when no two families spoke alike.25 They read that
sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir. ’Tis all
learning there—nothing but learning, except religion. And
that’s learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, ’tis a
serious-minded place. Not but there’s wenches in the streets
o’ nights.… You know, I suppose, that they raise pa’sons
there like radishes in a bed? And though it do take—how
many years, Bob?—five years to turn a lirruping26 hobble-de-
hoy chap into a solemn preaching man with no corrupt
passions, they’ll do it, if it can be done, and polish un off like
the workmen they be, and turn un out wi’ a long face, and a
long black coat and waistcoat, and a religious collar and hat,
same as they used to wear in the Scriptures, so that his own
mother wouldn’t know un sometimes.… There, ’tis their
business, like anybody else’s.’
‘But how should you know—’
‘Now don’t you interrupt, my boy. Never interrupt your
senyers. Move the fore hoss aside, Bobby; here’s some’at
coming.… You must mind that I be a-talking of the college
life. ’Em lives on a lofty level; there’s no gainsaying it,
though I myself med not think much of ’em. As we be here
in our bodies on this high ground, so be they in their minds
—nobleminded men enough, no doubt—some of ’em—able
to earn hundreds by thinking out loud. And some on ’em be
strong young fellows that can earn a’most as much in silver
cups. As for music, there’s beautiful music everywhere in
Christminster. You med be religious, or you med not, but you
can’t help striking in your homely note with the rest. And
there’s a street in the place—the main street—that ha’n’t
another like it in the world. I should think I did know a little
about Christminster!’
By this time the horses had recovered breath and bent to
their collars again. Jude, throwing a last adoring look at the
distant halo, turned and walked beside his remarkably well-
informed friend, who had no objection to tell him as they
moved on more yet of the city—its towers and halls and
churches. The waggon turned into a cross-road, whereupon
Jude thanked the carter warmly for his information, and said
he only wished he could talk half as well about Christminster
as he.
‘Well, ’tis oonly what has come in my way,’ said the carter
unboastfully. ‘I’ve never been there, no more than you; but
I’ve picked up the knowledge here and there, and you be
welcome to it. A-getting about the world as I do, and mixing
with all classes of society, one can’t help hearing of things.
A friend o’ mine, that used to clane the boots at the Crozier
Hotel in Christminster when he was in his prime, why, I
knowed un as well as my own brother in his later years.’
Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so
deeply that he forgot to feel timid. He suddenly grew older.
It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to
anchor on, to cling to—for some place which he could call
admirable. Should he find that place in this city if he could
get there? Would it be a spot in which, without fear of
farmers, or hindrance, or ridicule, he could watch and wait,
and set himself to some mighty undertaking like the men of
old of whom he had heard? As the halo had been to his eyes
when gazing at it a quarter of an hour earlier, so was the
spot mentally to him as he pursued his dark way.
‘It is a city of light,’ he said to himself.
‘The tree of knowledge grows there,’ he added a few
steps further on.
‘It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to.’
‘It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship
and religion.’
After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:
‘It would just suit me.’

I–4
Walking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration,
the boy—an ancient man in some phases of thought, much
younger than his years in others—was overtaken by a light-
footed pedestrian, whom, notwithstanding the gloom, he
could perceive to be wearing an extraordinarily tall hat, a
swallow-tailed coat,27 and a watch-chain that danced madly
and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner
swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots.
Jude, beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with
him.
‘Well, my man! I’m in a hurry, so you’ll have to walk
pretty fast if you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I
am?’
‘Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?’
‘Ah—I’m known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a
public benefactor.’
Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the
rustic population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else,
as he, indeed, took care to be, to avoid inconvenient
investigations. Cottagers formed his only patients, and his
Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His position
was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the
quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising.
He was, in fact, a survival. The distances he traversed on
foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length
and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one day seen him selling a
pot of coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a
bad leg, the woman arranging to pay a guinea, in
instalments of a shilling a fortnight, for the precious salve,
which, according to the physician, could only be obtained
from a particular animal which grazed on Mount Sinai, and
was to be captured only at great risk to life and limb. Jude,
though he already had his doubts about this gentleman’s
medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled
personage, and one who might be a trustworthy source of
information on matters not strictly professional.
 ‘I s’pose you’ve been to Christminster, Physician?’
‘I have—many times,’ replied the long thin man. ‘That’s
one of my centres.’
‘It’s a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?’
‘You’d say so, my boy, if you’d seen it. Why, the very sons
of the old women who do the washing of the colleges can
talk in Latin—not good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-
Latin—cat-Latin,28 as we used to call it in my undergraduate
days.’
‘And Greek?’
‘Well—that’s more for the men who are in training for
bishops, that they may be able to read the New Testament
in the original.’
‘I want to learn Latin and Greek myself.’
‘A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue.’
‘I mean to go to Christminster some day.’
‘Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the
only proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure
all disorders of the alimentary system, as well as asthma
and shortness of breath. Two and threepence a box—
specially licensed by the government stamp.’
‘Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it
hereabout?’
‘I’ll sell you mine with pleasure—those I used as a
student.’
‘O, thank you, sir!’ said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for
the amazing speed of the physician’s walk kept him in a
dog-trot which was giving him a stitch in the side.
‘I think you’d better drop behind, my young man. Now I’ll
tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get you the grammars, and give you
a first lesson, if you’ll remember, at every house in the
village, to recommend Physician Vilbert’s golden ointment,
life-drops, and female pills.’
‘Where will you be with the grammars?’
‘I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely the
hour of five-and-twenty minutes past seven. My movements
are as truly timed as those of the planets in their courses.’
‘Here I’ll be to meet you,’ said Jude.
‘With orders for my medicines?’
‘Yes, Physician.’
Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to
recover breath, and went home with a consciousness of
having struck a blow for Christminster.
Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and
smiled outwardly at his inward thoughts, as if they were
people meeting and nodding to him—smiled with that
singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to spread on
young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a
supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent
natures, giving rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies
about them.29
He honestly performed his promise to the man of many
cures, in whom he now sincerely believed, walking miles
hither and thither among the surrounding hamlets as the
physician’s agent in advance. On the evening appointed he
stood motionless on the plateau, at the place where he had
parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach. The
road-physician was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of
Jude on striking into his pace, which the pedestrian did not
diminish by a single unit of force, the latter seemed hardly
to recognize his young companion, though with the lapse of
the fortnight the evenings had grown light. Jude thought it
might perhaps be owing to his wearing another hat, and he
saluted the physician with dignity.
‘Well, my boy?’ said the latter abstractedly.
‘I’ve come,’ said Jude.
‘You? who are you? O yes—to be sure! Got any orders,
lad?’
‘Yes.’ And Jude told him the names and addresses of the
cottagers who were willing to test the virtues of the world-
renowned pills and salve. The quack mentally registered
these with great care.
 ‘And the Latin and Greek grammars?’ Jude’s voice
trembled with anxiety.
‘What about them?’
‘You were to bring me yours, that you used before you
took your degree.’
‘Ah, yes, yes! Forgot all about it—all! So many lives
depending on my attention, you see, my man, that I can’t
give so much thought as I would like to other things.’
Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of
the truth; and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, ‘You
haven’t brought ’em!’
‘No. But you must get me some more orders from sick
people, and I’ll bring the grammars next time.’
Jude dropped behind. He was an unsophisticated boy, but
the gift of sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to
children showed him all at once what shoddy humanity the
quack was made of. There was to be no intellectual light
from this source. The leaves dropped from his imaginary
crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it, and
cried bitterly.
The disappointment was followed by an interval of
blankness. He might, perhaps, have obtained grammars
from Alfredston, but to do that required money, and a
knowledge of what books to order; and though physically
comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as to be
without a farthing of his own.
At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it
gave Jude a lead. Why should he not write to the
schoolmaster, and ask him to be so kind as to get him the
grammars in Christminster? He might slip a letter inside the
case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach the
desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand
copies, which would have the charm of being mellowed by
the university atmosphere?
To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it. It
was necessary to act alone.
 After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and
on the day of the piano’s departure, which happened to be
his next birthday,30 clandestinely placed the letter inside the
packing-case, directed to his much-admired friend; being
afraid to reveal the operation to his aunt Drusilla, lest she
should discover his motive, and compel him to abandon his
scheme.
The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and
weeks, calling every morning at the cottage post-office
before his great-aunt was stirring. At last a packet did
indeed arrive at the village, and he saw from the ends of it
that it contained two thin books. He took it away into a
lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.
Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and
its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on
the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the
expressions of one language into those of another. He
concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would
contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature
of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by
merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own
speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was,
in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision
what is everywhere known as Grimm’s Law31—an
aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness. Thus
he assumed that the words of the required language were
always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the
given language by those who had the art to uncover them,
such art being furnished by the books aforesaid.
When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the
postmark of Christminster, he cut the string, opened the
volumes, and turned to the Latin grammar, which chanced
to come uppermost, he could scarcely believe his eyes.
The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled,
scribbled wantonly over with a strange name in every
variety of enmity to the letterpress, and marked at random
with dates twenty years earlier than his own day. But this
was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the
first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his
innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but
the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in
both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to
memory at the cost of years of plodding.
Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad
trunk of the elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the
space of a quarter of an hour. As he had often done before,
he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering
insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw. This
was Latin and Greek, then, was it, this grand delusion! The
charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour
like that of Israel in Egypt.32
What brains they must have in Christminster and the
great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by
one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his
head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays
continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he
had never seen a book, that he might never see another,
that he had never been born.
Somebody might have come along that way who would
have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by
saying that his notions were further advanced than those of
his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody
does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic
error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

I–5
During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and
singular vehicle might have been discerned moving along
the lanes and by-roads near Marygreen, driven in a quaint
and singular way.
 In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the
books Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him
by the dead languages. In fact, his disappointment at the
nature of those tongues had, after a while, been the means
of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To
acquire languages, departed or living, in spite of such
obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was
a herculean performance which gradually led him on to a
greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent
process. The mountain-weight of material under which the
ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the classics piqued
him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to move it
piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his
crusty maiden aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability,
and the business of the little cottage bakery had grown in
consequence. An aged horse with a hanging head had been
purchased for eight pounds at a sale, a creaking cart with a
whity-brown tilt obtained for a few pounds more, and in this
turn-out it became Jude’s business thrice a week to carry
loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters33
immediately around Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the
conveyance itself than in Jude’s manner of conducting it
along its route. Its interior was the scene of most of Jude’s
education by “private study.” As soon as the horse had
learnt the road and the houses at which he was to pause
awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his
arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to
the tilt, the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on
his knees, and plunge into the simpler passages from
Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the case might be, in his
purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure of labour
that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed
tears; yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read,
and divining rather than beholding the spirit of the original,
which often to his mind was something else than that which
he was taught to look for.
The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were
old Delphin editions,34 because they were superseded, and
therefore cheap. But, bad for idle school-boys, it did so
happen that they were passably good for him. The
hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up
the marginal readings, and used them merely on points of
construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor who
should have happened to be passing by. And though Jude
may have had little chance of becoming a scholar by these
rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting into
the groove he wished to follow.
While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had
already been thumbed by hands possibly in the grave,
digging out the thoughts of these minds so remote yet so
near, the bony old horse pursued his rounds, and Jude would
be aroused from the woes of Dido35 by the stoppage of his
cart and the voice of some old woman crying, ‘Two today,
baker, and I return this stale one.’
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and
others without his seeing them, and by degrees the people
of the neighbourhood began to talk about his method of
combining work and play (such they considered his reading
to be), which, though probably convenient enough to
himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other
travellers along the same roads. There were murmurs. Then
a private resident of an adjoining place informed the local
policeman that the baker’s boy should not be allowed to
read while driving, and insisted that it was the constable’s
duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the police
court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous
practices on the highway. The policeman thereupon lay in
wait for Jude, and one day accosted him and cautioned him.
As Jude had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to
heat the oven, and mix and set in the bread that he
distributed later in the day, he was obliged to go to bed at
night immediately after laying the sponge;36 so that if he
could not read his classics on the highways he could hardly
study at all. The only thing to be done was, therefore, to
keep a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could
in the circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as
anybody loomed in the distance, the policeman in particular.
To do that official justice, he did not put himself much in the
way of Jude’s bread-cart, considering that in such a lonely
district the chief danger was to Jude himself, and often on
seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in
another direction.
On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being
now about sixteen, and had been stumbling through the
‘Carmen Sæculare,’37 on his way home, he found himself to
be passing over the high edge of the plateau by the Brown
House. The light had changed, and it was the sense of this
which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down,
and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the
woods in the opposite quarter. His mind had become so
impregnated with the poem that, in a moment of the same
impulsive emotion which years before had caused him to
kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and
glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down
on the roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the
shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at
his doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other
hand, as he began:
‘Phoebe silvvarumque potens Diana!’38
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which
Jude repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he
would never have thought of humouring in broad daylight.
Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition,
innate or acquired, in doing this, and the strange
forgetfulness which had led to such a lapse from common-
sense and custom in one who wished, next to being a
scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of reading
heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the
more convinced he was of his inconsistency. He began to
wonder whether he could be reading quite the right books
for his object in life. Certainly there seemed little harmony
between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at
Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he
had taken up a wrong emotion for a Christian young man.
He had dabbled in Clarke’s Homer,39 but had never yet
worked much at the New Testament in the Greek, though he
possessed a copy, obtained by post from a second-hand
bookseller. He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a new
dialect, and for a long time onward limited his reading
almost entirely to the Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach’s
text.40 Moreover, on going into Alfredston one day, he was
introduced to patristic literature by finding at the
bookseller’s some volumes of the Fathers41 which had been
left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.
As another outcome of this change of groove he visited
on Sundays all the churches within a walk, and deciphered
the Latin inscriptions on fifteenth-century brasses and
tombs. On one of these pilgrimages he met with a
hunchbacked old woman of great intelligence, who read
everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him
more yet of the romantic charms of the city of light and lore.
Thither he resolved as firmly as ever to go.
But how live in that city? At present he had no income at
all. He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability
whatever on which he could subsist while carrying out an
intellectual labour which might spread over many years.
What was most required by citizens? Food, clothing, and
shelter. An income from any work in preparing the first
would be too meagre; for making the second he felt a
distaste; the preparation of the third requisite he inclined to.
They built in a city; therefore he would learn to build. He
thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin Susanna’s father,
an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow mediæval
art in any material was a trade for which he had rather a
fancy. He could not go far wrong in following his uncle’s
footsteps, and engaging himself awhile with the carcases
that contained the scholar souls.
As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of
freestone, metal not being available, and suspending his
studies awhile, occupied his spare half-hours in copying the
heads and capitals in his parish church.
There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston,
and as soon as he had found a substitute for himself in his
aunt’s little business, he offered his services to this man for
a trifling wage. Here Jude had the opportunity of learning at
least the rudiments of freestone-working. Some time later
he went to a church-builder in the same place, and under
the architect’s direction became handy at restoring the
dilapidated masonries of several village churches round
about.
Not forgetting that he was only following up this
handicraft as a prop to lean on while he prepared those
greater engines which he flattered himself would be better
fitted for him, he yet was interested in his pursuit on its own
account. He now had lodgings during the week in the little
town, whence he returned to Marygreen village every
Saturday evening. And thus he reached and passed his
nineteenth year.

I–6
At this memorable date of his life he was, one Saturday,
returning from Alfredston to Marygreen about three o’clock
in the afternoon. It was fine, warm, and soft summer
weather, and he walked with his tools at his back, his little
chisels clinking faintly against the larger ones in his basket.
It being the end of the week he had left work early, and had
come out of the town by a roundabout route which he did
not usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour-mill
near Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.
He was in an enthusiastic mood. He seemed to see his
way to living comfortably in Christminster in the course of a
year or two, and knocking at the doors of one of those
strongholds of learning of which he had dreamed so much.
He might, of course, have gone there now, in some capacity
or other, but he preferred to enter the city with a little more
assurance as to means than he could be said to feel at
present. A warm self-content suffused him when he
considered what he had already done. Now and then as he
went along he turned to face the peeps42 of country on
either side of him. But he hardly saw them; the act was an
automatic repetition of what he had been accustomed to do
when less occupied; and the one matter which really
engaged him was the mental estimate of his progress thus
far.
‘I have acquired quite an average student’s power to read
the common ancient classics, Latin in particular.’ This was
true, Jude possessing a facility in that language which
enabled him with great ease to himself to beguile his lonely
walks by imaginary conversations therein.
‘I have read two books of the Iliad, besides being pretty
familiar with passages such as the speech of Phoenix in the
ninth book, the fight of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth,
the appearance of Achilles unarmed and his heavenly
armour in the eighteenth, and the funeral games in the
twenty-third.43 I have also done some Hesiod, a little scrap
of Thucydides, and a lot of the Greek Testament.… I wish
there was only one dialect, all the same.
‘I have done some mathematics, including the first six
and the eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as
far as simple equations.
 ‘I know something of the Fathers, and something of
Roman and English history.
‘These things are only a beginning. But I shall not make
much further advance here, from the difficulty of getting
books. Hence I must next concentrate all my energies on
settling in Christminster. Once there I shall so advance, with
the assistance I shall there get, that my present knowledge
will appear to me but as childish ignorance. I must save
money, and I will; and one of those colleges shall open its
doors to me—shall welcome whom now it would spurn, if I
wait twenty years for the welcome.
‘I’ll be D.D.44 before I have done!’
And then he continued to dream, and thought he might
become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise,
Christian life. And what an example he would set! If his
income were £5000 a year, he would give away £4500 in
one form and another, and live sumptuously (for him) on the
remainder. Well, on second thoughts, a bishop was absurd.
He would draw the line at an archdeacon. Perhaps a man
could be as good and as learned and as useful in the
capacity of archdeacon as in that of bishop. Yet he thought
of the bishop again.
‘Meanwhile I will read, as soon as I am settled in
Christminster, the books I have not been able to get hold of
here: Livy, Tacitus, Herodotus, Æschylus, Sophocles,
Aristophanes—’
‘Ha, ha, ha! Hoity-toity!’45 The sounds were expressed in
light voices on the other side of the hedge, but he did not
notice them. His thoughts went on:
‘—Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca,
Antoninus. Then I must master other things: the Fathers
thoroughly; Bede and ecclesiastical history generally; a
smattering of Hebrew—I only know the letters as yet—’
‘Hoity-toity!’
‘—but I can work hard. I have staying power in
abundance, thank God! and it is that which tells.… Yes,
Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I’ll be her
beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased.’46
In his deep concentration on these transactions of the
future Jude’s walk had slackened, and he was now standing
quite still, looking at the ground as though the future were
thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On a sudden something
smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that
a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen
at his feet.
A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the
characteristic part of a barrow-pig,47 which the country-men
used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other
purpose. Pigs were rather plentiful hereabout, being bred
and fattened in large numbers in certain parts of North
Wessex.
On the other side of the hedge was a stream, whence, as
he now for the first time realized, had come the slight
sounds of voices and laughter that had mingled with his
dreams. He mounted the bank and looked over the fence.
On the further side of the stream stood a small homestead,
having a garden and pig-sties attached; in front of it, beside
the brook, three young women were kneeling, with buckets
and platters beside them containing heaps of pigs’
chitterlings,48 which they were washing in the running water.
One or two pairs of eyes slyly glanced up, and perceiving
that his attention had at last been attracted, and that he
was watching them, they braced themselves for inspection
by putting their mouths demurely into shape and
recommencing their rinsing operations with assiduity.
‘Thank you!’ said Jude severely.
‘I didn’t throw it, I tell you!’ asserted one girl to her
neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.
‘Nor I,’ the second answered.
‘O, Anny, how can you!’ said the third.
‘If I had thrown anything at all, it shouldn’t have been
that!’
 ‘Pooh! I don’t care for him!’ And they laughed and
continued their work, without looking up, still ostentatiously
accusing each other.
Jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face, and caught their
remarks.
‘You didn’t do it—O no!’ he said to the up-stream one of
the three.
She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl, not
exactly handsome, but capable of passing as such at a little
distance, despite some coarseness of skin and fibre. She
had a round and prominent bosom, full lips, perfect teeth,
and the rich complexion of a Cochin49 hen’s egg. She was a
complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less;
and Jude was almost certain that to her was attributable the
enterprise of attracting his attention from dreams of the
humaner letters to what was simmering in the minds around
him.
‘That you’ll never be told,’ said she deedily.50
‘Whoever did it was wasteful of other people’s property.’
‘O, that’s nothing.’
‘But you want to speak to me, I suppose?’
‘O yes; if you like to.’
‘Shall I clamber across, or will you come to the plank
above here?’
Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity; for somehow or
other the eyes of the brown girl rested in his own when he
had said the words, and there was a momentary flash of
intelligence, a dumb announcement of affinity in posse,51
between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley was
concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it. She saw that
he had singled her out from the three, as a woman is
singled out in such cases, for no reasoned purpose of further
acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to
conjunctive orders from headquarters, unconsciously
received by unfortunate men when the last intention of their
lives is to be occupied with the feminine.
 Springing to her feet, she said: ‘Bring back what is lying
there.’
Jude was now aware that no message on any matter
connected with her father’s business had prompted her
signal to him. He set down his basket of tools, picked up the
scrap of offal, beat a pathway for himself with his stick, and
got over the hedge. They walked in parallel lines, one on
each bank of the stream, towards the small plank bridge. As
the girl drew nearer to it, she gave, without Jude perceiving
it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in
succession, by which curious and original manœuvre she
brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a
perfect dimple, which she was able to retain there as long
as she continued to smile. This production of dimples at will
was a not unknown operation, which many attempted, but
only a few succeeded in accomplishing.
They met in the middle of the plank, and Jude, tossing
back her missile, seemed to expect her to explain why she
had audaciously stopped him by this novel artillery instead
of by hailing him.
But she, slyly looking in another direction, swayed herself
backwards and forwards on her hand as it clutched the rail
of the bridge; till, moved by amatory curiosity, she turned
her eyes critically upon him.
‘You don’t think I would shy things at you?’
‘O no.’
‘We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn’t
want anything thrown away. He makes that into dubbin.’52
She nodded towards the fragment on the grass.
‘What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?’ Jude
asked, politely accepting her assertion, though he had very
large doubts as to its truth.
‘Impudence. Don’t tell folk it was I, mind!’
‘How can I? I don’t know your name.’
‘Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?’
‘Do!’
 ‘Arabella Donn. I’m living here.’
‘I must have known it if I had often come this way. But I
mostly go straight along the high-road.’
‘My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me
wash the innerds for black-puddings53 and such like.’
They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood
regarding each other and leaning against the hand-rail of
the bridge. The unvoiced call of woman to man, which was
uttered very distinctly by Arabella’s personality, held Jude to
the spot against his intention—almost against his will, and in
a way new to his experience. It is scarcely an exaggeration
to say that till this moment Jude had never looked at a
woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely regarded
the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed
from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to
her full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the
water, and firm as marble.
‘What a nice-looking girl you are!’ he murmured, though
the words had not been necessary to express his sense of
her magnetism.
‘Ah, you should see me Sundays!’ she said piquantly.54
‘I don’t suppose I could?’ he answered.
‘That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just
now, though there med be in a week or two.’ She had
spoken this without a smile, and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it.
‘Will you let me?’
‘I don’t mind.’
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by
turning her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd
little sucking operation before mentioned, Jude being still
unconscious of more than a general impression of her
appearance. ‘Next Sunday?’ he hazarded. ‘Tomorrow, that
is?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shall I call?’
 ‘Yes.’
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him
almost tenderly with her eyes in turning, and retracing her
steps down the brook-side grass rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his
lonely way, filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood
at gaze. He had just inhaled a single breath from a new
atmosphere, which had evidently been hanging round him
everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had
somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a
sheet of glass. The intentions as to reading, working, and
learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few
minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a
corner, he knew not how.
‘Well, it’s only a bit of fun,’ he said to himself, faintly
conscious that to common-sense there was something
lacking, and still more obviously something redundant, in
the nature of this girl who had drawn him to her, which
made it necessary that he should assert mere sportiveness
on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her
quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been
occupied with literary study and the magnificent
Christminster dream. It had been no vestal55 who chose that
missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his
intellectual eye, just for a short fleeting while, as by the light
of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription
on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then
this passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude
was lost to all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh
and wild pleasure, that of having found a new channel for
emotional interest hitherto unsuspected, though it had lain
close beside him. He was to meet this enkindling one of the
other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she
silently resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings
in the pellucid stream.
 ‘Catched un, my dear?’ laconically asked the girl called
Anny.
‘I don’t know. I wish I had thrown something else than
that!’ regretfully murmured Arabella.
‘Lord! he’s nobody, though you med think so. He used to
drive old Drusilla Fawley’s bread-cart out at Marygreen, till
he ’prenticed himself at Alfredston. Since then he’s been
very stuck up, and always reading. He wants to be a scholar,
they say.’
‘O, I don’t care what he is, or anything about ’n. Don’t you
think it, my child!’
‘O, don’t ye! You needn’t try to deceive us! What did you
stay talking to him for, if you didn’t want un? Whether you
do or whether you don’t, he’s as simple as a child. I could
see it as you courted on the bridge, when he looked at ’ee
as if he had never seen a woman before in his born days.
Well, he’s to be had by any woman who can get him to care
for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him the right
way.’

I–7
The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with
the sloping ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and
then at the black mark on the plaster above them, made by
the smoke of his lamp in past months.
It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his
meeting with Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week
he had been resolving to set this afternoon apart for a
special purpose,—the rereading of his Greek Testament—his
new one, with better type than his old copy, following
Griesbach’s text as amended by numerous correctors, and
with variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the
book, having obtained it by boldly writing to its London
publisher, a thing he had never done before.
 He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s
reading, under the quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as
formerly, where he now slept only two nights a week. But a
new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the
gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a
snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and
cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its
new one.
He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down,
opened the book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the
table, and his hands to his temples, began at the beginning:
H KAINH ∆IAΘHKH56
• • • • • •
Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would
wait indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on
account of him. There was a something in her, too, which
was very winning, apart from promises. He ought not to
break faith with her. Even though he had only Sundays and
week-day evenings for reading he could afford one
afternoon, seeing that other young men afforded so many.
After to-day he would never probably see her again. Indeed,
it would be impossible, considering what his plans were.
In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of
extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him—
something which had nothing in common with the spirits
and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to
care little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called
elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent
schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar, in a
direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman for
whom he had no respect, and whose life had nothing in
common with his own except locality.
H KAINH ∆IAΘHKH was no more heeded, and the
predestinate57 Jude sprang up and across the room.
Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed himself in
his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house
and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow
of corn-ground which lay between the village and the
isolated house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.
As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in
two hours, easily, and a good long time would still remain to
him for reading after tea.
Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the
path joined the highway he hastened along, and struck
away to the left, descending the steep side of the country to
the west of the Brown House. Here at the base of the chalk
formation he neared the brook that oozed from it, and
followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of
piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the
originators of that smell. He entered the garden and
knocked at the door with the knob of his stick.
Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male
voice on the inside said:
‘Arabella! Here’s your young man come coorting! Mizzle,58
my girl!’
Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a business-like
aspect as it evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing
he was thinking of. He was going to walk with her, perhaps
kiss her; but ‘courting’ was too coolly purposeful to be
anything but repugnant to his ideas. The door was opened
and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs in radiant
walking attire.
‘Take a chair, Mr. What’s-your-name?’ said her father, an
energetic black-whiskered man, in the same business-like
tones Jude had heard from outside.
‘I’d rather go out at once, wouldn’t you?’ she whispered to
Jude.
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘We’ll walk up to the Brown House and
back, we can do it in half-an-hour.’
Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy
surroundings that he felt glad he had come, and all the
misgivings vanished that had hitherto haunted him.
First they clambered to the top of the great down, during
which ascent he had occasionally to take her hand to assist
her. Then they bore off to the left along the crest into the
ridgeway, which they followed till it intersected the high-
road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of his former
fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them
now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella
with greater zest than he would have felt in discussing all
the philosophies with all the Dons in the recently adored
University, and passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana
and Phœbus without remembering that there were any such
people in the mythology, or that the Sun was anything else
than a useful lamp for illuminating Arabella’s face. An
indescribable lightness of heel served to lift him along; and
Jude, the incipient scholar, prospective D. D., Professor,
Bishop, or what not, felt himself honoured and glorified by
the condescension of this handsome country wench in
agreeing to take a walk with him in her Sunday frock and
ribbons.
They reached the Brown House barn—the point at which
he had planned to turn back. While looking over the vast
northern landscape from this spot they were struck by the
rising of a dense volume of smoke from the neighbourhood
of the little town which lay beneath them at a distance of a
couple of miles.
‘It is a fire,’ said Arabella. ‘Let’s run and see it—do! It is
not far!’
The tenderness which had grown up in Jude’s bosom left
him no will to thwart her inclination now—which pleased him
in affording him excuse for a longer time with her. They
started off down the hill almost at a trot; but on gaining
level ground at the bottom, and walking a mile, they found
that the spot of the fire was much further off than it had
seemed.
 Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on;
but it was not till five o’clock that they found themselves on
the scene,—the distance being altogether about half-a-
dozen miles from Marygreen, and three from Arabella’s. The
conflagration had been got under by the time they reached
it, and after a short inspection of the melancholy ruins they
retraced their steps—their course lying through the town of
Alfredston.
Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered
an inn of an inferior class, and gave their order. As it was not
for beer they had a long time to wait. The maid-servant
recognized Jude, and whispered her surprise to her mistress
in the background, that he, the student, ‘who kept hisself up
so particular,’ should have suddenly descended so low as to
keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was
being said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender
gaze of her lover—the low and triumphant laugh of a
careless woman who sees she is winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of
Samson and Delilah59 which hung on the wall, and at the
circular beer-stains on the table, and at the spittoons
underfoot filled with sawdust. The whole aspect of the scene
had that depressing effect on Jude which few places can
produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when the
setting sun is slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the
unfortunate wayfarer finds himself with no other haven or
rest.
It began to grow dusk. They could not wait longer, really,
for the tea, they said. ‘Yet what else can we do?’ asked Jude.
‘It is a three-mile walk for you.’
‘I suppose we can have some beer,’ said Arabella.
‘Beer, O yes. I had forgotten that. Somehow it seems odd
to come to a public-house for beer on a Sunday evening.’
‘But we didn’t.’
‘No, we didn’t.’ Jude by this time wished he was out of
such an uncongenial atmosphere; but he ordered the beer,
which was promptly brought.
Arabella tasted it. ‘Ugh!’ she said.
Jude tasted. ‘What’s the matter with it!’ he asked. ‘I don’t
understand beer very much now, it is true. I like it well
enough, but it is bad to read on, and I find coffee better. But
this seems all right.’
‘Adulterated—I can’t touch it!’ She mentioned three or
four ingredients that she detected in the liquor beyond malt
and hops, much to Jude’s surprise.
‘How much you know!’ he said good-humouredly.
Nevertheless she returned to the beer and drank her
share, and they went on their way. It was now nearly dark,
and as soon as they had withdrawn from the lights of the
town they walked closer together, till they touched each
other. She wondered why he did not put his arm round her
waist, but he did not; he merely said what to himself
seemed a quite bold enough thing: ‘Take my arm.’
She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder. He felt the
warmth of her body against his, and putting his stick under
his other arm held with his right hand her right as it rested
in its place.
‘Now we are well together, dear, aren’t we?’ he observed.
‘Yes,’ said she; adding to herself: ‘Rather mild!’
‘How fast I have become!’ he was thinking.
Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland,
where they could see the white highway ascending before
them in the gloom. From this point the only way of getting
to Arabella’s was by going up the incline, and dipping again
into her valley on the right. Before they had climbed far they
were nearly run into by two men who had been walking on
the grass unseen.
‘These lovers—you find ’em out o’ doors in all seasons
and weathers—lovers and homeless dogs only,’ said one of
the men as they vanished down the hill.
Arabella tittered lightly.
‘Are we lovers?’ asked Jude.
 ‘You know best.’
‘But you can tell me?’
For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder. Jude
took the hint, and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled
her to him and kissed her.
They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had
desired, clasped together. After all, what did it matter since
it was dark, said Jude to himself. When they were half way
up the long hill they paused as by arrangement, and he
kissed her again. They reached the top, and he kissed her
once more.
‘You can keep your arm there, if you would like to,’ she
said gently.
He did so, thinking how trusting she was.
Thus they slowly went towards her home. He had left his
cottage at half-past three, intending to be sitting down
again to the New Testament by half-past five. It was nine
o’clock when, with another embrace, he stood to deliver her
up at her father’s door.
She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would
seem so odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in
the dark. He gave way, and followed her in. Immediately
that the door was opened he found, in addition to her
parents, several neighbours sitting round. They all spoke in
a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as
Arabella’s intended partner.
They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of
place and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere
afternoon of pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he
had meant. He did not stay longer than to speak to her
stepmother, a simple, quiet woman without features or
character; and bidding them all good night plunged with a
sense of relief into the track over the down.
But that sense was only temporary. Arabella soon
reasserted her sway in his soul. He walked as if he felt
himself to be another man from the Jude of yesterday. What
were his books to him? what were his intentions, hitherto
adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of
time day by day? ‘Wasting!’ It depended on your point of
view to define that: he was just living for the first time: not
wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a
graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!
When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed,
and a general consciousness of his neglect seemed written
on the face of all things confronting him. He went upstairs
without a light, and the dim interior of his room accosted
him with sad inquiry. There lay his book open, just as he had
left it, and the capital letters on the title-page regarded him
with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the unclosed
eyes of a dead man:
H KAINH ΔIAΘHKH.
• • • • • •
Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of
absence at lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that
he threw into his basket upon his tools and other
necessaries the unread books he had brought with him.
He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from
himself. Arabella, on the contrary, made them public among
all her friends and acquaintance.
Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a
few hours earlier under cover of darkness, with his
sweetheart by his side, he reached the bottom of the hill,
where he walked slowly, and stood still. He was on the spot
where he had given her the first kiss. As the sun had only
just risen it was possible that nobody had passed there
since. Jude looked on the ground and sighed. He looked
closely, and could just discern in the damp dust the imprints
of their feet as they had stood locked in each other’s arms.
She was not there now, and ‘the embroidery of imagination
upon the stuff of nature’60 so depicted her past presence
that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill. A
pollard willow61 stood close to the place, and that willow was
different from all other willows in the world. Utter
annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he
could see her again as he had promised would have been
his intensest wish if he had only the week to live.
An hour and half later Arabella came along the same way
with her two companions of the Saturday. She passed
unheedingly the scene of the kiss, and the willow that
marked it, though chattering freely on the subject to the
other two.
‘And what did he tell ’ee next?’
‘Then he said—’ And she related almost word for word
some of his tenderest speeches. If Jude had been behind the
fence he would have felt not a little surprised at learning
how very few of his sayings and doings on the previous
evening were private.
‘You’ve got him to care for ’ee a bit, ’nation62 if you han’t!’
murmured Anny judicially. ‘It’s well to be you!’
In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low,
hungry tone of latent sensuousness: ‘I’ve got him to care for
me: yes! But I want him to more than care for me; I want
him to have me—to marry me! I must have him. I can’t do
without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I shall go mad if
I can’t give myself to him altogether! I felt I should when I
first saw him!’
‘As he is a romancing, straightfor’ard, honest chap, he’s
to be had, and as a husband, if you set about catching him
in the right way.’
Arabella remained thinking awhile. ‘What med be the
right way?’ she asked.
‘O you don’t know—you don’t!’ said Sarah, the third girl.
‘On my word I don’t!—No further, that is, than by plain
courting, and taking care he don’t go too far!’
The third girl looked at the second. ‘She don’t know!’
‘ ’Tis clear she don’t!’ said Anny.
 ‘And having lived in a town, too, as one may say! Well, we
can teach ’ee som’at then, as well as you us.’
‘Yes. And how do you mean—a sure way to gain a man?
Take me for an innocent, and have done wi’ it!’
‘As a husband.’
‘As a husband.’
‘A countryman that’s honourable and serious-minded
such as he; God forbid that I should say a sojer, or sailor, or
commercial gent from the towns, or any of them that be
slippery with poor women! I’d do no friend that harm!’
‘Well, such as he, of course!’
Arabella’s companions looked at each other, and turning
up their eyes in drollery began smirking. Then one went up
close to Arabella, and, although nobody was near, imparted
some information in a low tone, the other observing
curiously the effect upon Arabella.
‘Ah!’ said the last-named slowly. ‘I own I didn’t think of
that way! … But suppose he isn’t honourable? A woman had
better not have tried it!’
‘Nothing venture nothing have! Besides, you make sure
that he’s honourable before you begin. You’d be safe
enough with yours. I wish I had the chance! Lots of girls do
it; or do you think they’d get married at all?’
Arabella pursued her way in silent thought. ‘I’ll try it!’ she
whispered; but not to them.

I–8
One week’s end Jude was as usual walking out to his aunt’s
at Marygreen from his lodging in Alfredston, a walk which
now had large attractions for him quite other than his desire
to see his aged and morose relative. He diverged to the
right before ascending the hill with the single purpose of
gaining, on his way, a glimpse of Arabella that should not
come into the reckoning of regular appointments. Before
quite reaching the homestead his alert eye perceived the
top of her head moving quickly hither and thither over the
garden hedge. Entering the gate he found that three young
unfattened pigs had escaped from their sty by leaping clean
over the top, and that she was endeavouring unassisted to
drive them in through the door which she had set open. The
lines of her countenance changed from the rigidity of
business to the softness of love when she saw Jude, and she
bent her eyes languishingly upon him. The animals took
advantage of the pause by doubling and bolting out of the
way.
‘They were only put in this morning!’ she cried,
stimulated to pursue in spite of her lover’s presence. ‘They
were drove from Spaddleholt Farm only yesterday, where
father bought ’em at a stiff price enough. They are wanting
to get home again, the stupid toads! Will you shut the
garden gate, dear, and help me to get ’em in? There are no
men folk at home, only mother, and they’ll be lost if we
don’t mind.’
He set himself to assist, and dodged this way and that
over the potato rows and the cabbages. Every now and then
they ran together, when he caught her for a moment and
kissed her. The first pig was got back promptly; the second
with some difficulty; the third, a long-legged creature, was
more obstinate and agile. He plunged through a hole in the
garden hedge, and into the lane.
‘He’ll be lost if I don’t follow ’n!’ said she. ‘Come along
with me!’
She rushed in full pursuit out of the garden, Jude
alongside her, barely contriving to keep the fugitive in sight.
Occasionally they would shout to some boy to stop the
animal, but he always wriggled past and ran on as before.
‘Let me take your hand, darling,’ said Jude. ‘You are
getting out of breath.’ She gave him her now hot hand with
apparent willingness, and they trotted along together.
‘This comes of driving ’em home,’ she remarked. ‘They
always know the way back if you do that. They ought to
have been carted over.’
By this time the pig had reached an unfastened gate
admitting to the open down, across which he sped with all
the agility his little legs afforded. As soon as the pursuers
had entered and ascended to the top of the high ground it
became apparent that they would have to run all the way to
the farmer’s if they wished to get him. From this summit he
could be seen as a minute speck, following an unerring line
towards his old home.
‘It is no good!’ cried Arabella. ‘He’ll be there long before
we get there. It don’t matter now we know he’s not lost or
stolen on the way. They’ll see it is ours, and send un back. O
dear, how hot I be!’
Without relinquishing her hold of Jude’s hand she swerved
aside and flung herself down on the sod under a stunted
thorn, precipitately pulling Jude on to his knees at the same
time.
‘O, I ask pardon—I nearly threw you down, didn’t I! But I
am so tired!’
She lay supine, and straight as an arrow, on the sloping
sod of this hill-top, gazing up into the blue miles of sky, and
still retaining her warm hold of Jude’s hand. He reclined on
his elbow near her.
‘We’ve run all this way for nothing,’ she went on, her form
heaving and falling in quick pants, her face flushed, her full
red lips parted, and a fine dew of perspiration on her skin.
‘Well—why don’t you speak, deary?’
‘I’m blown too. It was all up hill.’
They were in absolute solitude—the most apparent of all
solitudes, that of empty surrounding space. Nobody could
be nearer than a mile to them without their seeing him.
They were, in fact, on one of the summits of the county, and
the distant landscape around Christminster could be
discerned from where they lay. But Jude did not think of that
then.
 ‘O, I can see such a pretty thing up this tree,’ said
Arabella. ‘A sort of a—caterpillar, of the most loveliest green
and yellow you ever came across!’
‘Where?’ said Jude, sitting up.
‘You can’t see him there—you must come here,’ said she.
He bent nearer and put his head in front of hers. ‘No—I
can’t see it,’ he said.
‘Why, on the limb there where it branches off—close to
the moving leaf—there!’ She gently pulled him down beside
her.
‘I don’t see it,’ he repeated, the back of his head against
her cheek. ‘But I can, perhaps, standing up.’ He stood
accordingly, placing himself in the direct line of her gaze.
‘How stupid you are!’ she said crossly, turning away her
face.
‘I don’t care to see it, dear; why should I?’ he replied,
looking down upon her. ‘Get up, Abby.’
‘Why?’
‘I want you to let me kiss you. I’ve been waiting to ever so
long!’
She rolled round her face, remained a moment looking
deedily aslant at him; then with a slight curl of the lip
sprang to her feet, and exclaiming abruptly ‘I must mizzle!’
walked off quickly homeward. Jude followed and rejoined
her.
‘Just one!’ he coaxed.
‘Shan’t!’ she said.
He, surprised: ‘What’s the matter?’
She kept her two lips resentfully together, and Jude
followed her like a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and
walked beside him, talking calmly on indifferent subjects,
and always checking him if he tried to take her hand or
clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts of her
father’s homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye
to him with a supercilious, affronted air.
 ‘I expect I took too much liberty with her, somehow,’ Jude
said to himself, as he withdrew with a sigh and went on to
Marygreen.
On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella’s home was,
as usual, the scene of a grand weekly cooking, the
preparation of the special Sunday dinner. Her father was
shaving before a little glass hung on the mullion63 of the
window, and her mother and Arabella herself were shelling
beans hard by. A neighbour passed on her way home from
morning service at the nearest church, and seeing Donn
engaged at the window with the razor, nodded and came in.
She at once spoke playfully to Arabella: ‘I zeed ’ee
running with ’un—hee-hee! I hope ’tis coming to
something?’
Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her
face without raising her eyes.
‘He’s for Christminster, I hear, as soon as he can get
there.’
‘Have you heard that lately—quite lately?’ asked Arabella
with a jealous, tigerish indrawing of breath.
‘O no! But it has been known a long time that it is his
plan. He’s on’y waiting here for an opening. Ah well: he
must walk about with somebody I s’pose. Young men don’t
mean much now-a-days. ’Tis a sip here and a sip there with
’em. ’Twas different in my time.’
When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly to
her mother: ‘I want you and father to go and inquire how the
Edlins be, this evening after tea. Or no—there’s evening
service at Fensworth—you can walk to that.’
‘Oh? What’s up to-night, then?’
‘Nothing. Only I want the house to myself. He’s shy; and I
can’t get un to come in when you are here. I shall let him
slip through my fingers if I don’t mind, much as I care for
’n!’
‘If it is fine we med as well go, since you wish.’
 In the afternoon Arabella met and walked with Jude, who
had now for weeks ceased to look into a book of Greek,
Latin, or any other tongue. They wandered up the slopes till
they reached the green track along the ridge, which they
followed to the circular British earth-bank64 adjoining, Jude
thinking of the great age of the trackway, and of the drovers
who had frequented it, probably before the Romans knew
the country. Up from the level lands below them floated the
chime of church bells. Presently they were reduced to one
note, which quickened, and stopped.
‘Now we’ll go back,’ said Arabella, who had attended to
the sounds.
Jude assented. So long as he was near her he minded
little where he was. When they arrived at her house he said
lingeringly: ‘I won’t come in. Why are you in such a hurry to
go in to-night? It is not near dark.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said she. She tried the handle of the
door and found it locked.
‘Ah—they are gone to church,’ she added. And searching
behind the scraper she found the key and unlocked the door.
‘Now, you’ll come in a moment?’ she asked lightly. ‘We shall
be all alone.’
‘Certainly,’ said Jude with alacrity, the case being
unexpectedly altered.
Indoors they went. Did he want any tea? No, it was too
late: he would rather sit and talk to her. She took off her
jacket and hat and they sat down—naturally enough close
together.
‘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 defiantly, ‘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 excitement 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.

I–9
It was some two months later in the year, and the pair had
met constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed
dissatisfied; 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 honourable young men who had
drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he
unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what 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 affairs, 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 person who married them seemed
to think it satisfactory too.
And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, 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.65 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 bride-cake,
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 notepaper, 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 profits 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, however, felt that
all these makeshifts were temporary; she had gained a
husband; that was the thing—a husband with a lot of
earning power in him for buying her frocks and hats when
he should begin to get frightened a bit, and stick to his
trade, and throw aside those stupid books for practical
undertakings.
So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the
marriage, giving up his old room at his aunt’s—where so
much of the hard labour at Greek and Latin had been
carried on.
A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long
tail of hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous
knob at the back of her head, was deliberately unfastened,
stroked out, and hung upon the looking-glass which he had
bought her.
‘What—it wasn’t your own?’ he said, with a sudden
distaste for her.
‘O no—it never is nowadays with the better class.’
‘Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is
supposed to be different: Besides you’ve enough of your
own, surely?’
‘Yes, enough as country notions go. But in towns the men
expect more, and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—’
‘Barmaid at Aldbrickham?
‘Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a
public-house there—just for a little time; that was all. Some
people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a
fancy. The more you have the better in Aldbrickham, which
is a finer town than all your Christminsters. Every lady of
position wears false hair—the barber’s assistant told me so.’
Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this
might be true to some extent, for all that he knew, many
unsophisticated girls would and did go to towns and remain
there for years without losing their simplicity of life and
embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct towards
artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in
counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps
there was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and
he resolved to think no more of it.
A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest
for a few weeks, even though the prospects of the
household ways and means are cloudy. There is a certain
piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her
acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom
of facts, and renders even the humblest bride independent
awhile of the real. Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the
streets of Alfredston one market-day with this quality in her
carriage when she met Anny her former friend, whom she
had not seen since the wedding.
As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed
funny to them without saying it.
‘So it turned out a good plan you see!’ remarked the girl
to the wife. ‘I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear
good fellow, and you ought to be proud of un.’
‘I am,’ said Mrs. Fawley quietly.
‘And when do you expect—?’
‘Ssh! Not at all.’
‘What!’
‘I was mistaken.’
‘O Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well,
that’s clever—it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never
thought o’, wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond
bringing about the real thing—not that one could sham it!’
 ‘Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I
didn’t know.’
‘My word—won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’
Saturday nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick—a
double one, by the Lord!’
‘I’ll own to the first, but not to the second.… Pooh—he
won’t care! He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll
shake down, bless ’ee—men always do. What can ’em do
otherwise? Married is married.’
Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella
approached the time when in the natural course of things
she would have to reveal that the alarm she had raised had
been without foundation. The occasion was one evening at
bed-time, and they were in their chamber in the lonely
cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his
work every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve
hours, and had retired to rest before his wife. When she
came into the room he was between sleeping and waking,
and was barely conscious of her undressing before the little
looking-glass as he lay.
One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition.
Her face being reflected towards him as she sat, he could
perceive that she was amusing herself by artificially
producing in each cheek the dimple before alluded to, a
curious accomplishment of which she was mistress,
effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for
the first time that the dimples were far oftener absent from
her face during his intercourse with her nowadays than they
had been in the earlier weeks of their acquaintance.
‘Don’t do that, Arabella!’ he said suddenly. ‘There is no
harm in it, but—I don’t like to see you.’
She turned and laughed. ‘Lord, I didn’t know you were
awake!’ she said. ‘How countrified you are! That’s nothing.’
‘Where did you learn it?’
‘Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any
trouble when I was at the public-house; but now they won’t.
My face was fatter then.’
‘I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a
woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized
figure like you.’
‘Most men think otherwise.’
‘I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you
know?’
‘I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.’
‘Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your
knowing about the adulteration of the ale when we went
and had some that Sunday evening. I thought when I
married you that you had always lived in your father’s
house.’
‘You ought to have known better than that, and seen I
was a little more finished than I could have been by staying
where I was born. There was not much to do at home, and I
was eating my head off, so I went away for three months.’
‘You’ll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why, of course—little things to make.’
‘Oh.’
‘When will it be? Can’t you tell me exactly, instead of in
such general terms as you have used?’
‘Tell you?’
‘Yes—the date.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. I made a mistake.
‘What?’
‘It was a mistake.’
He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. ‘How can
that be?’
‘Women fancy wrong things sometimes.’
‘But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a
stick of furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn’t have
hurried on our affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut
before I was ready, if it had not been for the news you gave
me, which made it necessary to save you, ready or no.…
Good God!’
‘Don’t take on dear. What’s done can’t be undone.’
‘I have no more to say!’
He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was
silence between them.
When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the
world with a different eye. As to the point in question he was
compelled to accept her word; in the circumstances he
could not have acted otherwise while ordinary notions
prevailed. But how came they to prevail?
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something
wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling
of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and
labour, of foregoing a man’s one opportunity of showing
himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing
his units of work to the general progress of his generation,
because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory
instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and
could be only at the most called weakness. He was inclined
to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter,
that he deserved to be caught in a gin66 which would cripple
him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime? There was
perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the immediate
reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But
the marriage remained.

I–10
The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife
had fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the
butchering was timed to take place as soon as it was light in
the morning, so that Jude might get to Alfredston without
losing more than a quarter of a day.
The night had seemed strangely silent. Jude looked out of
the window long before dawn, and perceived that the
ground was covered with snow—snow rather deep for the
season, it seemed, a few flakes still falling.
‘I’m afraid the pig-killer won’t be able to come,’ he said to
Arabella.
‘O, he’ll come. You must get up and make the water hot, if
you want Challow to scald him. Though I like singeing best.’
‘I’ll get up,’ said Jude. ‘I like the way of my own county.’67
He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and
began feeding it with bean-stalks, all the time without a
candle, the blaze flinging a cheerful shine into the room;
though for him the sense of cheerfulness was lessened by
thoughts on the reason of that blaze—to heat water to scald
the bristles from the body of an animal that as yet lived, and
whose voice could be continually heard from a corner of the
garden. At half-past six, the time of appointment with the
butcher, the water boiled, and Jude’s wife came downstairs.
‘Is Challow come?’ she asked.
‘No.’
They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a
snowy dawn. She went out, gazed along the road, and
returning said, ‘He’s not coming. Drunk last night, I expect.
The snow is not enough to hinder him, surely!’
‘Then we must put it off. It is only the water boiled for
nothing. The snow may be deep in the valley.’
‘Can’t be put off. There’s no more victuals for the pig. He
ate the last mixing o’ barleymeal yesterday morning.’
‘Yesterday morning? What has he lived on since?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What—he has been starving?’
‘Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother
with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!’
‘That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!’
‘Well—you must do the sticking—there’s no help for it. I’ll
show you how. Or I’ll do it myself—I think I could. Though as
it is such a big pig I had rather Challow had done it.
However, his basket o’ knives and things have been already
sent on here, and we can use ’em.’
‘Of course you shan’t do it,’ said Jude. ‘I’ll do it, since it
must be done.’
He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the
space of a couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in
front, with the knives and ropes at hand. A robin peered
down at the preparations from the nearest tree, and, not
liking the sinister look of the scene, flew away, though
hungry. By this time Arabella had joined her husband, and
Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the
affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise,
rose to repeated cries of rage. Arabella opened the sty-door,
and together they hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs
upward, and while Jude held him Arabella bound him down,
looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling.
The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now
rage, but the cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.
‘Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig
than have had this to do!’ said Jude. ‘A creature I have fed
with my own hands.’
‘Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-
knife—the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t
stick un too deep.’
‘I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it.
That’s the chief thing.’
‘You must not!’ she cried. ‘The meat must be well bled,
and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a
score68 if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein,
that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good
butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten
minutes dying, at least.’
‘He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the
meat may look,’ said Jude determinedly. Scraping the
bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the
butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all
his might.
‘ ’O 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
somebody 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.69 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.’
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 slaughter 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!’70 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 dissatisfied 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 courtship 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 common-place nor gaining 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 discourse, 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.’
‘ ’Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter
when she told him she was …’
What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that
he should make her his ‘mis’ess,’ otherwise wife? The
suggestion was horridly unpleasant, and it rankled in his
mind so much that instead of entering his own cottage when
he reached it he flung his basket inside the garden-gate and
passed on, determined to go and see his old aunt and get
some supper there.
This made his arrival home rather late. Arabella, however,
was busy melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig,
for she had been out on a jaunt all day, and so delayed her
work. Dreading lest what he had heard should lead him to
say something regrettable to her he spoke little. But
Arabella was very talkative, and said among other things
that she wanted some money. Seeing the book sticking out
of his pocket she added that he ought to earn more.
 ‘An apprentice’s wages are not meant to be enough to
keep a wife on, as a rule, my dear.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have had one.’
‘Come, Arabella! That’s too bad, when you know how it
came about.’
‘I’ll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you
was true. Doctor Vilbert thought so. It was a good job for
you that it wasn’t so!’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said hastily. ‘I mean before that
time. I know it was not your fault; but those women friends
of yours gave you bad advice. If they hadn’t, or you hadn’t
taken it, we should at this moment have been free from a
bond which, not to mince matters, galls both of us devilishly.
It may be very sad, but it is true.’
‘Who’s been telling you about my friends? What advice? I
insist upon your telling me.’
‘Pooh—I’d rather not.’
‘But you shall—you ought to. It is mean of ’ee not to!’
‘Very well.’ And he hinted gently what had been revealed
to him. ‘But I don’t wish to dwell upon it. Let us say no more
about it.’
Her defensive manner collapsed. ‘That was nothing,’ she
said, laughing coldly. ‘Every woman has a right to do such
as that. The risk is hers.’
‘I quite deny it, Bella. She might if no life-long penalty
attached to it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if
the weakness of the moment could end with the moment, or
even with the year. But when effects stretch so far she
should not go and do that which entraps a man if he is
honest, or herself if he is otherwise.’
‘What ought I to have done?’
‘Given me time.… Why do you fuss yourself about melting
down that pig’s fat to-night? Please put it away!’
‘Then I must do it to-morrow morning. It won’t keep.’
‘Very well—do.’
 I–11
Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations
about ten o’clock; and the renewed work recalled the
conversation which had accompanied it the night before,
and put her back into the same intractable temper.
‘That’s the story about me in Marygreen, is it—that I
entrapped ’ee? Much of a catch you were, Lord send!’ As
she warmed she saw some of Jude’s dear ancient classics on
a table where they ought not to have been laid. ‘I won’t
have them books here in the way!’ she cried petulantly; and
seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon the
floor.
‘Leave my books alone!’ he said. ‘You might have thrown
them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that,
it is disgusting!’ In the operation of making lard Arabella’s
hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her
fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the
book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the books
severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing,
caught her by the arms to make her leave off. Somehow, in
doing so, he loosened the fastening of her hair, and it rolled
about her ears.
‘Let me go!’ she said.
‘Promise to leave the books alone.’
She hesitated. ‘Let me go!’ she repeated.
‘Promise!’
After a pause: ‘I do.’
Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to
the door, out of which she went with a set face, and into the
highway. Here she began to saunter up and down,
perversely pulling her hair into a worse disorder than he had
caused, and unfastening several buttons of her gown. It was
a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the bells of
Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the
north. People were going along the road, dressed in their
holiday clothes; they were mainly lovers—such pairs as Jude
and Arabella had been when they sported along the same
track some months earlier. These pedestrians turned to
stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now presented,
bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind, her
bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her
work, and her hands reeking with melted fat. One of the
passers said in mock terror: ‘Good Lord deliver us!’
‘See how he’s served me!’ she cried. ‘Making me work
Sunday mornings when I ought to be going to my church,
and tearing my hair off my head, and my gown off my
back!’
Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by
main force. Then he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with
the sense that all was over between them, and that it
mattered not what she did, or he, her husband stood still,
regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by
the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of
having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling
which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone
render a life-long comradeship tolerable.
‘Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used
your mother, and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?’
she asked. ‘All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!’
Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her. But she said
no more, and continued her saunter till she was tired. He left
the spot, and, after wandering vaguely a little while, walked
in the direction of Marygreen. Here he called upon his great-
aunt, whose infirmities daily increased.
‘Aunt—did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her
husband?’ said Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.
She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the bygone
bonnet that she always wore. ‘Who’s been telling you that?’
she said.
‘I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all.’
 ‘You med so well, I s’pose; though your wife—I reckon
’twas she—must have been a fool to open up that! There
isn’t much to know after all. Your father and mother couldn’t
get on together, and they parted. It was coming home from
Alfredston market, when you were a baby—on the hill by the
Brown House barn—that they had their last difference, and
took leave of one another for the last time. Your mother
soon afterwards died—she drowned herself, in short, and
your father went away with you to South Wessex, and never
came here anymore.’
Jude recalled his father’s silence about North Wessex and
Jude’s mother, never speaking of either till his dying day.
‘It was the same with your father’s sister. Her husband
offended her, and she so disliked living with him afterwards
that she went away to London with her little maid. The
Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit
well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that won’t take
kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily
enough if not bound. That’s why you ought to have
hearkened to me, and not ha’ married.’
‘Where did father and mother part—by the Brown House,
did you say?’
‘A little further on—where the road to Fenworth branches
off, and the handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not
onconnected with our history. But let that be.’
In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old
aunt’s as if to go home. But as soon as he reached the open
down he struck out upon it till he came to a large round
pond. The frost continued, though it was not particularly
sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow and
flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then
the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter
him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice
making sharp noises as he went. When just about the
middle he looked around him and gave a jump. The cracking
repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped again,
but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge,
and stepped upon the ground.
It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He
supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for
suicide. Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and
would not take him.
What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination;
what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present
degraded position? He could get drunk. Of course that was
it; he had forgotten. Drinking was the regular, stereotyped
resource of the despairing worthless. He began to see now
why some men boozed at inns. He struck down the hill
northwards and came to an obscure public-house. On
entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson
and Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as
that he had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday
evening of their courtship. He called for liquor and drank
briskly for an hour or more.
Staggering homeward late that night, with all his sense of
depression gone, and his head fairly clear still, he began to
laugh boisterously, and to wonder how Arabella would
receive him in his new aspect. The house was in darkness
when he entered, and in his stumbling state it was some
time before he could get a light. Then he found that, though
the marks of pig-dressing, of fats and scallops,71 were
visible, the materials themselves had been taken away. A
line written by his wife on the inside of an old envelope was
pinned to the cotton blower72 of the fireplace:
‘Have gone to my friends. Shall not return.’
All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the
carcase of the pig to Alfredston. He then cleaned up the
premises, locked the door, put the key in a place she would
know if she came back, and returned to his masonry at
Alfredston.
At night when he again plodded home he found she had
not visited the house. The next day went in the same way,
and the next. Then there came a letter from her.
That she had grown tired of him she frankly admitted. He
was such a slow old coach, and she did not care for the sort
of life he led. There was no prospect of his ever bettering
himself or her. She further went on to say that her parents
had, as he knew, for some time considered the question of
emigrating to Australia, the pig-jobbing73 business being a
poor one nowadays. They had at last decided to go, and she
proposed to go with them, if he had no objections. A woman
of her sort would have more chance over there than in this
stupid country.
Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her
going. He thought it a wise course, since she wished to go,
and one that might be to the advantage of both. He
enclosed in the packet containing the letter the money that
had been realized by the sale of the pig, with all he had
besides, which was not much.
From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly,
though her father and his household did not immediately
leave, but waited till his goods and other effects had been
sold off. When Jude learnt that there was to be an auction of
the house of the Donns he packed his own household goods
into a waggon, and sent them to her at the aforesaid
homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as
many of them as she should choose.
He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a
shop-window the little handbill announcing the sale of his
father-in-law’s furniture. He noted its date, which came and
passed without Jude’s going near the place, or perceiving
that the traffic out of Alfredston by the southern road was
materially increased by the auction. A few days later he
entered a dingy broker’s shop in the main street of the
town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a
clothes-horse, rolling pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-
glass, and other things at the back of the shop, evidently
just brought in from a sale, he perceived a framed
photograph, which turned out to be his own portrait.
It was one which he had had specially taken and framed
by a local man in bird’s-eye maple,74 as a present for
Arabella, and had duly given her on their wedding-day. On
the back was still to be read, ‘Jude to Arabella,’ with the
date. She must have thrown it in with the rest of her
property at the auction.
‘Oh,’ said the broker, seeing him look at this and the
other articles in the heap, and not perceiving that the
portrait was of himself: ‘It is a small lot of stuff that was
knocked down to me at a cottage sale out on the road to
Marygreen. The frame is a very useful one, if you take out
the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling.’
The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as
brought home to him by this mute and undesigned evidence
of her sale of his portrait and gift, was the conclusive little
stroke required to demolish all sentiment in him. He paid the
shilling, took the photograph away with him, and burnt it,
frame and all, when he reached his lodging.
Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her
parents had departed. He had sent a message offering to
see her for a formal leave-taking, but she had said that it
would be better otherwise, since she was bent on going,
which perhaps was true. On the evening following their
emigration, when his day’s work was done, he came out of
doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too
familiar road towards the upland whereon had been
experienced the chief emotions of his life. It seemed to be
his own again.
He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed
to be a boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood
dreaming at the top of that hill, inwardly fired for the first
time with ardours for Christminster and scholarship. ‘Yet I
am a man,’ he said. ‘I have a wife. More, I have arrived at
the still riper stage of having disagreed with her, disliked
her, had a scuffle with her, and parted from her.’
He remembered then that he was standing not far from
the spot at which the parting between his father and his
mother was said to have occurred.
A little further on was the summit whence Christminster,
or what he had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible.
A milestone, now as always, stood at the roadside hard by.
Jude drew near it, and felt rather than read the mileage to
the city. He remembered that once on his way home he had
proudly cut with his keen new chisel an inscription on the
back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations. It had
been done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before he
had been diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable
woman. He wondered if the inscription were legible still, and
going to the back of the milestone brushed away the
nettles. By the light of a match he could still discern what he
had cut so enthusiastically so long ago:
THITHER
J. F.
The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and
nettles, lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan
should be to move onward through good and ill—to avoid
morbid sorrow even though he did see uglinesses in the
world? Bene agere et Lœtari—to do good cheerfully—which
he had heard to be the philosophy of one Spinoza,75 might
be his own even now.
He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his
original intention.
By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the
horizon in a north-easterly direction. There actually rose the
faint halo, a small dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable
save by the eye of faith. It was enough for him. He would go
to Christminster as soon as the term of his apprenticeship
expired.
 He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his
prayers.
 1. “For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3.6).
2. Based on the village of Fawley in Berkshire, where Hardy’s paternal
grandmother, Mary Head, lived as a girl. Hardy visited the village in October
1892 (F. E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 [London: Macmillan,
1962], pp. 250–51; hereafter cited as Life).
3. A book of the Apocrypha. I Esdras 4.26, 27, 32.
4. With a “tilt” or canvas cover.
5. A small upright piano.
6. When Christ was crucified, “all his acquaintance … stood afar off, beholding
these things” (Luke 23.49).
7. Hardy’s manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (hereafter referred
to as “Hardy’s manuscript”) shows that Jude’s surname gave him
considerable trouble: earlier versions were Head, Stancombe, Hopeson, and
England.
8. Baggage, possessions.
9. This dialect word is a corruption of harlequin. Hardy’s manuscript shows that
he first wrote scamp. In a letter of 1904 he explained its meaning as “wild-
looking urchin, object, scarecrow (as applied to a small boy).”
10. With dormer windows (projecting windows in a sloping roof).
11. With a projecting edge to the roof.
12. Might (dialect).
13. A ridged form of velvet cloth used for hard-wearing clothes.
14. Parts of a suit of armor designed to protect the thighs.
15. A similar incident occurs in the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s novel
Great Expectations (1861).
16. Serious (dialect).
17. Job 30.1.
18. Energy, go (dialect). “Or’nary”: mediocre, inferior (dialect).
19. Cf. Hardy’s account of his own childhood feelings in the Life, pp. 15–16.
20. Ancient road crossing England from Norfolk in the east to Cornwall in the
southwest.
21. Mythical monsters.
22. In a story by the German romantic writer Wilhelm Hauff (1802–1827).
“Herne”: according to medieval legend, a ghostly hunter who haunted
Windsor Great Park. “Apollyon”: monster in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
23. The original Greek title of Revelation is Apocalypsis. The phrase “The new
Jerusalem”: Revelation 3.12.
24. “I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no
hurt” (Daniel 3.25).
25. Genesis 11.
26. Slouching, ungainly (dialect).
27. A dress coat or tailcoat; before c. 1850 these were not restricted to evening
wear.
28. Seems to be Physician Vilbert’s invention. “Dog-Latin”: bad Latin.
29. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” (Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of
Immortality).
30. “Eleventh birthday,” according to Hardy’s manuscript.
31. Concerned with consonant changes between related languages; named after
Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), German philologist and folklorist.
32. “And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour: And they
made their lives bitter with hard bondage” (Exodus 1.13–14).
33. Occupants of cottages belonging to a farm.
34. Series of Latin classics originally published in France about 1670.
35. Queen of Carthage who committed suicide after being abandoned by
Aeneas: the story is told by Virgil (Aeneid 4).
36. In breadmaking, “sponge” is a starter mixture of yeast and flour, which, after
fermenting, is mixed with more flour to make the dough.
37. Latin poem by Horace, written 17 B.C.E.
38. “Phoebus and Diana, queen of the woods!” This invocation to the moon is
the opening line of the Carmen Saeculare.
39. Samuel Clarke’s edition of Homer was published in 1818. Hardy’s own copy
of this book still exists (see here).
40. Before he was twenty, Hardy had studied the New Testament in the original
Greek from “a new text, Griesbach’s, that he had seen advertised as the most
correct” (Life, p. 29). Griesbach was a German theologian; his edition had
been published in 1775. “Ionic”: the most important of the ancient Greek
dialects.
41. Christian writers of the first five centuries C.E.
42. Momentary glimpses.
43. This list corresponds exactly to a penciled list of his favorite passages made
by the young Hardy in his copy of Clarke’s Homer; the book, inscribed
“Thomas Hardy 1858,” is now in the Dorset County Museum (W. R. Rutland,
Thomas Hardy [New York, 1938], pp. 21–22).
44. Doctor of Divinity.
45. Putting on airs, huffy, haughty.
46. “And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased” (Matthew 3.17). The passage is one of several suggesting
parallels between Jude and Christ.
47. Castrated boar. “Characteristic part”: the penis.
48. Pig’s intestines used as food.
49. Type of fowl originally from China.
50. Energetically.
51. Potentially.
52. Grease used to render leather waterproof.
53. Sausages made from pig’s blood and suet. “Innerds”: internal organs,
viscera.
54. Fascinatingly, charmingly.
55. Virgin or innocent (from vestal virgins, priestesses in the temple of Vesta in
ancient Rome).
56. “The New Testament” (Greek).
57. Destined by divine will—a theological term used sardonically here.
58. Hurry up (dialect).
59. Loved by Samson, she betrayed him to his enemies after making him drunk
(Judges 16). The story has an obvious relevance to Jude’s situation. For later
references, see here and here.
60. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) defined love in these terms in
his Philosophical Dictionary (1764).
61. With the branches trimmed to encourage growth.
62. Short for damnation.
63. Vertical bar dividing a window into sections.
64. Ancient earthwork, perhaps originally for defense.
65. The allusion is to the marriage service of the Anglican Church, in which the
couple promise to “live together,” and to “love” and “honor” each other, “till
death us do part.”
66. Trap. In a later episode, the metaphor is translated into literal terms (see
here and here).
67. Wiltshire bacon was prized and singeing was used in its preparation. Jude,
who comes originally from South Wessex, perhaps (Dorset), sticks to the
scalding technique practiced there.
68. Twenty pounds’ weight.
69. Black puddings.
70. Smile or sneer (dialect).
71. “The stringy part of the fat which cannot be resolved into lard” (Wright’s
English Dialect Dictionary).
72. Curtain hung over a fireplace to produce a current of air.
73. Dealing in pigs. Not true at the time, so Hardy probably intends his readers
to see that Arabella is lying about this.
74. Distinctive and valuable form of hardwood.
75. Dutch philosopher (1632–1677).

Part Second: At Christminster1

‘Save his own soul he hath no star.’
—Swinburne2

‘Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;

Tempore crevit amor.’
—Ovid3

II–1
The next noteworthy move in Jude’s life was that in which
he appeared gliding steadily onward through a dusky
landscape of some three years’ later leafage than had
graced his courtship of Arabella, and the disruption of his
coarse conjugal life with her. He was walking towards
Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the south-west
of it.
He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and
Alfredston: he was out of his apprenticeship, and with his
tools at his back seemed to be in the way of making a new
start—the start to which, barring the interruption involved in
his intimacy and married experience with Arabella, he had
been looking forward for about ten years.
Jude would now have been described as a young man
with a forcible, meditative, and earnest rather than
handsome cast of countenance. He was of dark complexion,
with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore a closely trimmed
black beard of more advanced growth than is usual at his
age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some
trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust
that settled on it in the pursuit of his trade.4 His capabilities
in the latter, having been acquired in the country, were of
an all-round sort, including monumental stonecutting, gothic
free-stone work for the restoration of churches, and carving
of a general kind. In London he would probably have
become specialized and have made himself a ‘moulding
mason,’ a ‘foliage sculptor’—perhaps a ‘statuary.’
He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to
the village nearest the city in this direction, and was now
walking the remaining four miles rather from choice than
from necessity, having always fancied himself arriving thus.
The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin—
one more nearly related to the emotional side of him than to
the intellectual, as is often the case with young men. One
day while in lodgings at Alfredston he had gone to
Marygreen to see his old aunt, and had observed between
the brass candlesticks on her mantelpiece the photograph
of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating folds
under the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who she
was. His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his
cousin Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family;
and on further questioning the old woman had replied that
the girl lived in Christminster, though she did not know
where, or what she was doing.
His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it
haunted him; and ultimately formed a quickening5
ingredient in his latent intent of following his friend the
schoolmaster thither.
He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle
declivity, and obtained his first near view of the city. Grey
stoned and dun-roofed, it stood within hail of the Wessex
border, and almost with the tip of one small toe within it, at
the northernmost point of the crinkled line along which the
leisurely Thames strokes the fields of that ancient kingdom.
The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset, a vane here and
there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle to a
picture of sober secondary and tertiary hues.
Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way
between pollard willows growing indistinct in the twilight,
and soon confronted the outmost lamps of the town—some
of those lamps which had sent into the sky the gleam and
glory that caught his strained gaze in his days of dreaming,
so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him
dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all
these years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not
much want him now.
He was a species of Dick Whittington6 whose spirit was
touched to finer issues than a mere material gain. He went
along the outlying streets with the cautious tread of an
explorer. He saw nothing of the real city in the suburbs on
this side. His first want being a lodging he scrutinized
carefully such localities as seemed to offer on inexpensive
terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded;
and after inquiry took a room in a suburb nick-named
‘Beersheba,’7 though he did not know this at the time. Here
he installed himself, and having had some tea sallied forth.
 It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide
himself he opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The
breeze ruffled and fluttered it, but he could see enough to
decide on the direction he should take to reach the heart of
the place.
After many turnings he came up to the first ancient
mediæval pile that he had encountered. It was a college, as
he could see by the gateway. He entered it, walked round,
and penetrated to dark corners which no lamplight reached.
Close to this college was another; and a little further on
another; and then he began to be encircled as it were with
the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he
passed objects out of harmony with its general expression
he allowed his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see
them.
A bell8 began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-
one strokes had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he
thought; it was meant for a hundred.
When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get
into the quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and
doorways, feeling with his fingers the contours of their
mouldings and carving. The minutes passed, fewer and
fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined among
the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through
ten bygone years, and what mattered a night’s rest for
once? High against the black sky the flash of a lamp would
show crocketed9 pinnacles and indented battlements. Down
obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now by the foot of
man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten,
there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,10 doorways of
enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being
accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed
impossible that modern thought could house itself in such
decrepit and superseded chambers.
Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be
impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with
a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked
but could not make himself seen or heard. He drew his
breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost,
gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with which
the nooks were haunted.
During the interval of preparation for this venture, since
his wife and furniture’s uncompromising disappearance into
space, he had read and learnt almost all that could be read
and learnt by one in his position, of the worthies who had
spent their youth within these reverend walls, and whose
souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of
them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his
fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest.
The brushing of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and
door-jambs were as the passing of these only other
inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf on its neighbour
were as the mutterings of their mournful souls, the shadows
as their thin shapes in nervous movement, making him
comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he ran
against them without feeling their bodily frames.
The streets were now deserted, but on account of these
things he could not go in. There were poets abroad, of early
date and of late, from the friend and eulogist of
Shakespeare11 down to him who has recently passed into
silence,12 and that musical one of the tribe who is still
among us.13 Speculative philosophers drew along, not
always with wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed
portraits, but pink-faced, slim, and active as in youth;
modern divines sheeted in their surplices, among whom the
most real to Jude Fawley were the founders of the religious
school called Tractarian; the well-known three, the
enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist,14 the echoes of
whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure
home. A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move
them at sight of those other sons of the place, the form in
the full-bottomed wig, statesman, rake, reasoner, and
sceptic; smoothly shaven historian so ironically civil to
Christianity,15 with others of the same incredulous temper,
who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and took equal
freedom in haunting its cloisters.
He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of
firmer movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the
speaker, the plodder; the man whose mind grew with his
growth in years, and the man whose mind contracted with
the same.
The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-
sight in an odd impossible combination, men of meditative
faces, strained foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with
constant research; then official characters—such men as
Governor-Generals and Lord-Lieutenants, in whom he took
little interest; Chief-Justices and Lord Chancellors, silent
thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely the names. A
keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of his own
former hopes. Of them he had an ample band—some men of
heart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the
Church in Latin;16 the saintly author of the Evening Hymn;17
and near them the great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer,
and zealot18 shadowed like Jude by his matrimonial
difficulties.
Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding
conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a
melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other
side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a start at
his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the
wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or
thinker over his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and
wondered what voice it was, and what it betokened. Jude
now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went, he had the
whole aged city to himself with the exception of a belated
townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be
catching a cold.
 A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local
voice:
‘You’ve been a-settin’ a long time on that plinth-stone,
young man. What med you be up to?’
It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude
without the latter observing him.
Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about
these men and their several messages to the world from a
book or two that he had brought with him concerning the
sons of the University. As he drew towards sleep various
memorable words of theirs that he had just been conning
seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances; some
audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres19
(who afterwards mourned Christminster as ‘the home of lost
causes,’ though Jude did not remember this) was now
apostrophizing her thus:
‘Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! … Her
ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all
of us, to the ideal, to perfection.’
Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert,20 whose
phantom he had just seen in the quadrangle with a great
bell. Jude thought his soul might have been shaping the
historic words of his master-speech:
‘Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty
towards a country threatened with famine requires that that
which has been the ordinary remedy under all similar
circumstances should be resorted to now, namely, that
there should be free access to the food of man from
whatever quarter it may come.… Deprive me of office to-
morrow, you can never deprive me of the consciousness
that I have exercised the powers committed to me from no
corrupt or interested motives, from no desire to gratify
ambition, for no personal gain.’
Then the sly author21 of the immortal Chapter on
Christianity: ‘How shall we excuse the supine inattention of
the Pagan and philosophic world, to those evidences
[miracles] which were presented by Omnipotence? … The
sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful
spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in
the moral or physical government of the world.’
Then the shade of the poet,22 the last of the optimists:
‘How the world is made for each of us!
• • • • • •
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan.’
Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now,
the author of the Apologia:23
‘My argument was … that absolute certitude as to the
truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage
of concurring and converging probabilities … that
probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might
create a mental certitude.’
The second of them,24 no polemic, murmured quieter
things:
‘Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will’d, we die’?
He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom
with the short face, the genial Spectator:25
‘When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of
envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful,
every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief
of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with
compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents
themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom
we must quickly follow.’
And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate26 spoke, during whose
meek, familiar rhyme, endeared to him from earliest
childhood, Jude fell asleep:
 ‘Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die …’
He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to
have gone, and everything spoke of to-day. He started up in
bed, thinking he had overslept himself, and then said:
‘By Jove—I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin,
and that she’s here all the time! … and my old
schoolmaster, too.’ His words about his schoolmaster had,
perhaps, less zest in them than his words concerning his
cousin.

II–2
Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean
bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a
while, and compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under
immediate needs. He had to get up, and seek for work,
manual work; the only kind deemed by many of its
professors to be work at all.
Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that
the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic
countenances: some were pompous; some had put on the
look of family vaults above ground; something barbaric
loomed in the masonries of all. The spirits of the great men
had disappeared.
The numberless architectural pages around him he read,
naturally, less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an
artizan and comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose
muscles had actually executed those forms. He examined
the mouldings, stroked them as one who knew their
beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the working,
had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm, or
convenient to the tool.
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the
more or less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he
perceived, been inflicted on the aged erections. The
condition of several moved him as he would have been
moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded,
broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly
struggle against years, weather, and man.
The rottenness of these historical documents reminded
him that he was not, after all, hastening on to begin the
morning practically as he had intended. He had come to
work, and to live by work, and the morning had nearly gone.
It was, in one sense, encouraging to think that in a place of
crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of his trade
to do in the business of renovation. He asked his way to the
workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given
him at Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the
rubbers and chisels.
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with
keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact
likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on
the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the
lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of
those antiques might have been called prose when they
were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become
poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible
to most men.
He asked for the foreman, and looked among the new
traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and
battlements standing on the bankers27 half worked, or
waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision,
mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in
the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;
jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.
For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that
here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as
that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the
noblest of the colleges. But he lost it under stress of his old
idea. He would accept any employment which might be
offered him on the strength of his late employer’s
recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional
thing only. This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.
Moreover he perceived that at best only copying,
patching and imitating went on here; which he fancied to be
owing to some temporary and local cause. He did not at that
time see that mediævalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a
lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the
world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its
associations had no place. The deadly animosity of
contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he
held in reverence was not yet revealed to him.
Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away,
and thought again of his cousin, whose presence
somewhere at hand he seemed to feel in wavelets of
interest, if not of emotion. How he wished he had that pretty
portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt to send it. She
did so, with a request, however, that he was not to bring
disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or her
relations. Jude, a ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised
nothing, put the photograph on the mantelpiece, kissed it—
he did not know why—and felt more at home. She seemed
to look down and preside over his tea. It was cheering—the
one thing uniting him to the emotions of the living city.
There remained the schoolmaster—probably now a
reverend parson. But he could not possibly hunt up such a
respectable man just yet; so raw and unpolished was his
condition, so precarious were his fortunes. Thus he still
remained in loneliness. Although people moved round him
he virtually saw none. Not as yet having mingled with the
active life of the place it was largely non-existent to him.
But the saints and prophets in the window-tracery, the
paintings in the galleries, the statues, the busts, the
gurgoyles, the corbel28-heads—these seemed to breathe his
atmosphere. Like all new comers to a spot on which the past
is deeply graven he heard that past announcing itself with
an emphasis altogether unsuspected by, and even
incredible to, the habitual residents.
For many days he haunted the cloisters and quadrangles
of the colleges at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by
impish echoes of his own footsteps, smart as the blows of a
mallet. The Christminster ‘sentiment,’ as it had been called,
ate further and further into him; till he probably knew more
about those buildings materially, artistically, and
historically, than any one of their inmates.
It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the
spot of his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away
from the object of that enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall
divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his
with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had
nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest.29 Only a wall—but what a wall!
Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he
saw them going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with
them, heard their voices, marked their movements. The
conversation of some of the more thoughtful among them
seemed oftentimes, owing to his long and persistent
preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to his own
thoughts. Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at
the antipodes. Of course he was. He was a young workman
in a white blouse, and with stone-dust in the creases of his
clothes; and in passing him they did not even see him, or
hear him, rather saw through him as through a pane of glass
at their familiars beyond. Whatever they were to him, he to
them was not on the spot at all; and yet he had fancied he
would be close to their lives by coming there.
But the future lay ahead after all; and if he could only be
so fortunate as to get into good employment he would put
up with the inevitable. So he thanked God for his health and
strength, and took courage. For the present he was outside
the gates of everything, colleges included: perhaps some
day he would be inside. Those palaces of light and leading;
he might some day look down on the world through their
panes.
At length he did receive a message from the
stonemason’s yard—that a job was waiting for him. It was
his first encouragement, and he closed with the offer
promptly.
He was young and strong, or he never could have
executed with such zest the undertakings to which he now
applied himself, since they involved reading most of the
night after working all the day. First he bought a shaded
lamp for four and sixpence, and obtained a good light. Then
he got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as he
had been unable to obtain elsewhere. Then, to the
consternation of his landlady, he shifted all the furniture of
his room—a single one for living and sleeping—rigged up a
curtain on a rope across the middle, to make a double
chamber out of one, hung up a thick blind that nobody
should know how he was curtailing the hours of sleep, laid
out his books, and sat down.
Having been deeply encumbered by marrying, getting a
cottage, and buying the furniture which had disappeared in
the wake of his wife, he had never been able to save any
money since the time of those disastrous ventures, and till
his wages began to come in he was obliged to live in the
narrowest way. After buying a book or two he could not even
afford himself a fire; and when the nights reeked with the
raw and cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp in a
great-coat, hat, and woollen gloves.
From his window he could perceive the spire of the
Cathedral, and the ogee30 dome under which resounded the
great bell of the city. The tall tower, tall belfry windows, and
tall pinnacles of the college by the bridge he could also get
a glimpse of by going to the staircase. These objects he
used as stimulants when his faith in the future was dim.
Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into
details of procedure. Picking up general notions from casual
acquaintance, he never dwelt upon them. For the present,
he said to himself, the one thing necessary was to get ready
by accumulating money and knowledge, and await
whatever chances were afforded to such an one of
becoming a son of the University. ‘For wisdom is a defence,
and money is a defence; but the excellency of knowledge is,
that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.’31 His desire
absorbed him, and left no part of him to weigh its
practicability.
At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from
his poor old aunt, on the subject which had previously
distressed her—a fear that Jude would not be strong-minded
enough to keep away from his cousin Sue Bridehead and her
relations. Sue’s father, his aunt believed, had gone back to
London, but the girl remained at Christminster. To make her
still more objectionable she was an artist or designer of
some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse,
which was a perfect seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no
doubt abandoned to mummeries32 on that account—if not
quite a Papist. (Miss Drusilla Fawley was of her date,
Evangelical.)
As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a
theological, this news of Sue’s probable opinions did not
much influence him one way or the other, but the clue to
her whereabouts was decidedly interesting. With an
altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spare
minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt’s
description; and beheld in one of them a young girl sitting
behind a desk, who was suspiciously like the original of the
portrait. He ventured to enter on a trivial errand, and having
made his purchase lingered on the scene. The shop seemed
to be kept entirely by women. It contained Anglican books,
stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster angels on
brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses
that were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost
missals.33 He felt very shy of looking at the girl in the desk;
she was so pretty that he could not believe it possible that
she should belong to him. Then she spoke to one of the two
older women behind the counter; and he recognized in the
accents certain qualities of his own voice; softened and
sweetened, but his own. What was she doing? He stole a
glance round. Before her lay a piece of zinc, cut to the
shape of a scroll three or four feet long, and coated with a
dead-surface paint on one side. Hereon she was designing
or illuminating, in characters of Church text, the single word

‘A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!’ thought he.

Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her
skill in work of this sort having no doubt been acquired from
her father’s occupation as an ecclesiastical worker in metal.
The lettering on which she was engaged was clearly
intended to be fixed up in some chancel to assist devotion.
He came out. It would have been easy to speak to her
there and then, but it seemed scarcely honourable towards
his aunt to disregard her request so incontinently. She had
used him roughly, but she had brought him up: and the fact
of her being powerless to control him lent a pathetic force to
a wish that would have been inoperative as an argument.
So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet.
He had other reasons against doing so when he had walked
away. She seemed so dainty beside himself in his rough
working-jacket and dusty trousers that he felt he was as yet
unready to encounter her, as he had felt about Mr.
Phillotson. And how possible it was that she had inherited
the antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as far as
a Christian could, particularly when he had told her that
unpleasant part of his history which had resulted in his
becoming enchained to one of her own sex whom she would
certainly not admire.
 Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was
there. The consciousness of her living presence stimulated
him. But she remained more or less an ideal character,
about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic
day-dreams.
Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was
engaged with some more men, outside Crozier College in
Old-time Street, in getting a block of worked freestone from
a waggon across the pavement, before hoisting it to the
parapet which they were repairing. Standing in position the
head man said, ‘Spail34 when ye heave! He-ho!’ And they
heaved.
All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his
elbow, pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the
obstructing object should have been removed. She looked
right into his face with liquid, untranslatable eyes, that
combined, or seemed to him to combine, keenness with
tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as well
as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just
spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his face
quite unconsciously. She no more observed his presence
than that of the dust-motes which his manipulations raised
into the sunbeams.
His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled,
and turned his face away with a shy instinct to prevent her
recognizing him, though as she had never once seen him
she could not possibly do so; and might very well never
have heard even his name. He could perceive that though
she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter girlhood of some
years in London, and a womanhood here, had taken all
rawness out of her.
When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on
her. He had been so caught by her influence that he had
taken no count of her general mould and build. He
remembered now that she was not a large figure, that she
was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was
about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her;
all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter
might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the
much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way
removed from the rusticity that was his. How could one of
his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock, have
contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done
it, he supposed.
From this moment the emotion which had been
accumulating in his breast as the bottled-up effect of
solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt in, insensibly
began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form; and he
perceived that, whatever his obedient wish in a contrary
direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to
make himself known to her.
He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since
there were crushing reasons why he should not and could
not think of her in any other.
The first reason was that he was married, and it would be
wrong. The second was that they were cousins. It was not
well for cousins to fall in love even when circumstances
seemed to favour the passion. The third: even were he free,
in a family like his own where marriage usually meant a
tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would
duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness
might be intensified to a tragic horror.
Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only
a relation’s mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard
her in a practical way as some one to be proud of; to talk
and nod to; later on, to be invited to tea by, the emotion
spent on her being rigorously that of a kinsman and well-
wisher. So would she be to him a kindly star, an elevating
power, a companion in Anglican worship, a tender friend.

II–3
But under the various deterrent influences Jude’s instinct
was to approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went
to the morning service in the Cathedral-church of Cardinal
College to gain a further view of her, for he had found that
she frequently attended there.
She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon,
which was finer. He knew that if she came at all she would
approach the building along the eastern side of the great
green quadrangle from which it was accessible, and he
stood in a corner while the bell was going. A few minutes
before the hour for service she appeared as one of the
figures walking along under the College walls, and at sight
of her he advanced up the side opposite, and followed her
into the building, more than ever glad that he had not as yet
revealed himself. To see her, and to be himself unseen and
unknown, was enough for him at present.
He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was
some way advanced when he was put into a seat. It was a
louring, mournful, still afternoon, when a religion of some
sort seems a necessity to ordinary practical men, and not
only a luxury of the emotional and leisured classes. In the
dim light and the baffling glare of the clerestory35 windows
he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only,
but he saw that Sue was among them. He had not long
discovered the exact seat that she occupied when the
chanting of the 119th Psalm in which the choir was engaged
reached its second part, In quo corriget, the organ changing
to a pathetic Gregorian36 tune as the singers gave forth:
‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?’
It was the very question that was engaging Jude’s
attention at this moment. What a wicked worthless fellow he
had been to give vent as he had done to an animal passion
for a woman, and allow it to lead to such disastrous
consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself;
then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of
pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the
supernatural as he had been, it is not wonderful that he
could hardly believe that the psalm was not specially set by
some regardful Providence for this moment of his first entry
into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary psalm
for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.
The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an
extraordinary tenderness, was at this time ensphered by the
same harmonies as those which floated into his ears; and
the thought was a delight to him. She was probably a
frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in
church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit,
had, no doubt, much in common with him. To an
impressionable and lonely young man the consciousness of
having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which
promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities,
was like the dew of Hermon,37 and he remained throughout
the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.
Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might
have said to him that the atmosphere blew as distinctly
from Cyprus as from Galilee.38
Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the
screen before he himself moved. She did not look towards
him, and by the time he reached the door she was half way
down the broad path. Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he
was inclined to follow her and reveal himself. But he was not
quite ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with the kind of
feeling that was awakening in him?
For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis
during the service, and he had persuaded himself that such
was the case, he could not altogether be blind to the real
nature of the magnetism. She was such a stranger that the
kinship was affectation, and he said, ‘It can’t be! I, a man
with a wife, must not know her!’ Still Sue was his own kin,
and the fact of his having a wife, even though she was not
in evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one
sense. It would put all thought of a tender wish on his part
out of Sue’s mind, and make her intercourse with him free
and fearless. It was with some heartache that he saw how
little he cared for the freedom and fearlessness that would
result in her from such knowledge.

Some little time before the date of this service in the

cathedral the pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman
Sue Bridehead had an afternoon’s holiday, and leaving the
ecclesiastical establishment in which she not only assisted
but lodged, took a walk into the country with a book in her
hand. It was one of those cloudless days which sometimes
occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and
wet, as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god. She
went along for a mile or two until she came to much higher
ground than that of the city she had left behind her. The
road passed between green fields, and coming to a stile Sue
paused there, to finish the page she was reading, and then
looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles new
and old.
On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld
a foreigner with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the
grass beside a large square board whereon were fixed, as
closely as they could stand, a number of plaster statutettes,
some of them bronzed which he was rearranging before
proceeding with them on his way.39 They were in the main
reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities
of a very different character from those the girl was
accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of
standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo,
Bacchus, and Mars. Though the figures were many yards
away from her the south-west sun brought them out so
brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern
their contours with luminous distinctness; and being almost
in a line between herself and the church towers of the city
they were awoke in her an oddly foreign and contrasting set
of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and, seeing her,
politely took off his cap, and cried ‘I-i-i-mages!’ in an accent
that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he
dexterously lifted upon his knee the great board with its
assembled notabilities divine and human, and raised it to
the top of his head, bringing them on to her and resting the
board on the stile. First he offered her his smaller wares—
the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then a
winged Cupid. She shook her head.
‘How much are these two?’ she said, touching with her
finger the Venus and the Apollo—the largest figures on the
tray.
He said she should have them for ten shillings.
‘I cannot afford that,’ said Sue. She offered considerably
less, and to her surprise the image-man drew them from
their wire stay and handed them over the stile. She clasped
them as treasures.
When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she
began to be concerned as to what she should do with them.
They seemed so very large now that they were in her
possession, and so very naked. Being of a nervous
temperament she trembled at her enterprise. When she
handled them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and
jacket. After carrying them along a little way openly an idea
came to her, and, pulling some huge burdock leaves,
parsley,40 and other rank growths from the hedge, she
wrapped up her burden as well as she could in these, so that
what she carried appeared to be an enormous armful of
green stuff gathered by a zealous lover of nature.
‘Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fal-
lals!’ she said. But she was still in a trembling state, and
seemed almost to wish she had not bought the figures.
Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that
Venus’s arm was not broken, she entered with her heathen
load into the most Christian city in the country by an
obscure street running parallel to the main one and round a
corner to the side door of the establishment to which she
was attached. Her purchases were taken straight up to her
own chamber, and she at once attempted to lock them in a
box that was her very own property; but finding them too
cumbersome she wrapped them in large sheets of brown
paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner.
The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly
lady in spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at
Ritual,41 as became one of her business, and a worshipper at
the ceremonial church of St. Silas, in the suburb of
Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also had begun to
attend. She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several
years before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking
over a little shop of church requisites and developing it to its
present creditable proportions. She wore a cross and beads
round her neck as her only ornament, and knew the
Christian Year42 by heart.
She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl
did not respond for a moment, entered the room just as the
other was hastily putting a string round each parcel.
‘Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?’ she
asked, regarding the enwrapped objects.
‘Yes—just something to ornament my room,’ said Sue.
‘Well, I should have thought I had put enough here
already,’ said Miss Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-
framed prints of saints, the Church-text scrolls, and other
articles which, having become too stale to sell, had been
used to furnish this obscure chamber. ‘What is it? How
bulky!’ She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer, in the
brown paper, and tried to peep in. ‘Why, statuary? Two
figures? Where did you get them?’
‘O—I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts—’
‘Two saints?’
‘Yes,’
‘What ones?’
 ‘St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.’
‘Well—now come down to tea, and go and finish that
organ-text, if there’s light enough afterwards.’
These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been
the merest passing fancy, created in Sue a great zest for
unpacking her objects and looking at them; and at bedtime,
when she was sure of being undisturbed, she unrobed the
divinities in comfort. Placing the pair of figures on the chest
of drawers, a candle on each side of them, she withdrew to
the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began reading a
book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew
nothing of. It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the
chapter dealing with the reign of Julian the Apostate.43
Occasionally she looked up at the statuettes, which
appeared strange and out of place, there happening to be a
Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene
suggested the action, she at length jumped up and
withdrew another book from her box—a volume of verse—
and turned to the familiar poem—which she read to the end.
‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:
The world has grown grey from thy breath!44
Presently she put out the candles, undressed, and finally
extinguished her own light.
She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-
night she kept waking up, and every time she opened her
eyes there was enough diffused light from the street to
show her the white plaster figures, standing on the chest of
drawers in odd contrast to their environment of text and
martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was only
discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being
obscured by the shades.
On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some
small hour. It fell upon the ears of another person who sat
bending over his books at a not very distant spot in the
same city. Being Saturday night the morrow was one on
which Jude had not set his alarm clock to call him at his
usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as was his
custom, two or three hours later than he could afford to do
on any other day of the week. Just then he was earnestly
reading from his Griesbach’s text. At the very time that Sue
was tossing and staring at her figures, the policeman and
belated citizens passing along under his window might have
heard, if they had stood still, strange syllables mumbled
with fervour within—words that had for Jude an
indescribable enchantment: inexplicable sounds something
like these:—
‘All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai
hemeis eis auton:’
Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book
was heard to close:—
‘Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai
hemeis di autou!’45

II–4
He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as
artizans in country-towns are apt to be. In London the man
who carves the boss or knob of leafage declines to cut the
fragment of moulding which merges in that leafage, as if it
were a degradation to do the second half of one whole.
When there was not much Gothic moulding for Jude to run,
or much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out
lettering monuments or tombstones, and take a pleasure in
the change of handiwork.
The next time that he saw her was when he was on a
ladder executing a job of this sort inside one of the
churches. There was a short morning service, and when the
parson entered Jude came down from his ladder, and sat
with the half-dozen people forming the congregation, till the
prayers should be ended, and he could resume his tapping.
He did not observe till the service was half over that one of
the women was Sue, who had perforce accompanied the
elderly Miss Fontover thither.
Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy,
curiously nonchalant risings and sittings, and her
perfunctory genuflexions, and thought what a help such an
Anglican would have been to him in happier circumstances.
It was not so much his anxiety to get on with his work that
made him go up to it immediately the worshippers began to
take their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot,
confront the woman who was beginning to influence him in
such an indescribable manner. Those three enormous
reasons why he must not attempt intimate acquaintance
with Sue Bridehead now that his interest in her had shown
itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind, loomed as
stubbornly as ever. But it was also obvious that man could
not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any
rate, wanted something to love. Some men would have
rushed incontinently to her, snatched the pleasure of easy
friendship which she could hardly refuse, and have left the
rest to chance. Not so Jude—at first.
But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely
evenings, dragged along, he found himself, to his moral
consternation, to be thinking more of her instead of thinking
less of her, and experiencing a fearful bliss in doing what
was erratic, informal, and unexpected. Surrounded by her
influence all day, walking past the spots she frequented, he
was always thinking of her, and was obliged to own to
himself that his conscience was likely to be the loser in this
battle.
To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still. Perhaps
to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and
unauthorized passion. A voice whispered that, though he
desired to know her, he did not desire to be cured.
There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox
point of view the situation was growing immoral. For Sue to
be the loved one of a man who was licensed by the laws of
his country to love Arabella and none other unto his life’s
end, was a pretty bad second beginning when the man was
bent on such a course as Jude purposed. This conviction was
so real with him that one day when, as was frequent, he was
at work in a neighbouring village church alone, he felt it to
be his duty to pray against his weakness. But much as he
wished to be an exemplar in these things he could not get
on. It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered
from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be
tempted unto seventy times seven. So he excused himself.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘it is not altogether an erotolepsy46 that is
the matter with me, as at that first time. I can see that she
is exceptionally bright; and it is partly a wish for intellectual
sympathy, and a craving for loving-kindness in my solitude.’
Thus he went on adoring her, fearing to realize that it was
human perversity. For whatever Sue’s virtues, talents, or
ecclesiastical saturation, it was certain that those items
were not at all the cause of his affection for her.
On an afternoon at this time a young girl entered the
stone-mason’s yard with some hesitation, and, lifting her
skirts to avoid draggling them in the white dust, crossed
towards the office.
‘That’s a nice girl,’ said one of the men known as Uncle
Joe.
‘Who is she?’ asked another.
‘I don’t know—I’ve seen her about here and there. Why,
yes, she’s the daughter of that clever chap Bridehead who
did all the wrought ironwork at St. Silas’47 ten years ago, and
went away to London afterwards. I don’t know what he’s
doing now—not much I fancy—as she’s come back here.’
Meanwhile the young woman had knocked at the office
door and asked if Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard. It
so happened that Jude had gone out somewhere or other
that afternoon, which information she received with a look
of disappointment, and went away immediately. When Jude
returned they told him, and described her, whereupon he
exclaimed, ‘Why—that’s my cousin Sue!’
He looked along the street after her, but she was out of
sight. He had no longer any thought of a conscientious
avoidance of her, and resolved to call upon her that very
evening. And when he reached his lodging he found a note
from her—a first note—one of those documents which,
simple and commonplace in themselves, are seen
retrospectively to have been pregnant with impassioned
consequences. The very unconsciousness of a looming
drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from
women to men, or vice versa, makes them, when such a
drama follows, and they are read over by the purple or lurid
light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and in cases,
terrible.
Sue’s was of the most artless and natural kind. She
addressed him as her dear cousin Jude; said she had only
just learnt by the merest accident that he was living in
Christminster, and reproached him with not letting her
know. They might have had such nice times together, she
said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had hardly
any congenial friend. But now there was every probability of
her soon going away, so that the chance of companionship
would be lost perhaps for ever.
A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was
going away. That was a contingency he had never thought
of, and it spurred him to write all the more quickly to her. He
would meet her that very evening, he said, one hour from
the time of the writing, at the cross in the pavement which
marked the spot of the Martyrdoms.48
When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted
that in his hurry he should have suggested to her to meet
him out of doors, when he might have said he would call
upon her. It was, in fact, the country custom to meet thus,
and nothing else had occurred to him. Arabella had been
met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might not seem
respectable to a dear girl like Sue. However, it could not be
helped now, and he moved towards the point a few minutes
before the hour, under the glimmer of the newly lighted
lamps.
The broad street was silent, and almost deserted,
although it was not late. He saw a figure on the other side,
which turned out to be hers, and they both converged
towards the cross-mark at the same moment. Before either
had reached it she called out to him:
‘I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in
my life! Come further on.’
The voice, though positive and silvery, had been
tremulous. They walked on in parallel lines, and, waiting her
pleasure, Jude watched till she showed signs of closing in,
when he did likewise, the place being where the carriers’
carts stood in the daytime, though there was none on the
spot then.
‘I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn’t call,’
began Jude with the bashfulness of a lover. ‘But I thought it
would save time if we were going to walk.’
‘O—I don’t mind that,’ she said with the freedom of a
friend. ‘I have really no place to ask anybody in to. What I
meant was that the place you chose was so horrid—I
suppose I ought not to say horrid,—I mean gloomy and
inauspicious in its associations … But isn’t it funny to begin
like this, when I don’t know you yet?’ She looked him up and
down curiously, though Jude did not look much at her.
‘You seem to know me more than I know you,’ she added.
‘Yes—I have seen you now and then.’
‘And you knew who I was, and didn’t speak? And now I
am going away!’
‘Yes. That’s unfortunate. I have hardly any other friend. I
have, indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I
don’t quite like to call on him just yet. I wonder if you know
anything of him—Mr. Phillotson? A parson somewhere about
the county I think he is.’
 ‘No—I only know of one Mr. Phillotson. He lives a little way
out in the country, at Lumsdon.49 He’s a village
schoolmaster.’
‘Ah! I wonder if he’s the same. Surely it is impossible!
Only a schoolmaster still! Do you know his Christian name—
is it Richard?’
‘Yes—it is; I’ve directed books to him, though I’ve never
seen him.’
‘Then he couldn’t do it!’
Jude’s countenance fell, for how could he succeed in an
enterprise wherein the great Phillotson had failed? He would
have had a day of despair if the news had not arrived during
his sweet Sue’s presence, but even at this moment he had
visions of how Phillotson’s failure in the grand University
scheme would depress him when she had gone.
‘As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call
upon him?’ said Jude suddenly. ‘It is not late.’
She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through
some prettily wooded country. Presently the embattled
tower and square turret of the church rose into the sky, and
then the schoolhouse. They inquired of a person in the
street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to be at home, and were
informed that he was always at home. A knock brought him
to the schoolhouse door, with a candle in his hand and a
look of inquiry on his face, which had grown thin and
careworn since Jude last set eyes on him.
That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson
should be of this homely complexion destroyed at one
stroke the halo which had surrounded the schoolmaster’s
figure in Jude’s imagination ever since their parting. It
created in him at the same time a sympathy with Phillotson
as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man.
Jude told him his name, and said he had come to see him as
an old friend who had been kind to him in his youthful days.
‘I don’t remember you in the least,’ said the schoolmaster
thoughtfully. ‘You were one of my pupils you say? Yes, no
doubt; but they number so many thousands by this time of
my life, and have naturally changed so much, that I
remember very few except the quite recent ones.’
‘It was out at Marygreen,’ said Jude, wishing he had not
come.
‘Yes. I was there a short time. And is this an old pupil,
too?’
‘No—that’s my cousin.… I wrote to you for some
grammars, if you recollect, and you sent them?’
‘Ah—yes!—I do dimly recall that incident.’
‘It was very kind of you to do it. And it was you who first
started me on that course. On the morning you left
Marygreen, when your goods were on the waggon, you
wished me good-bye, and said your scheme was to be a
University man and enter the church—that a degree was the
necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a
theologian or teacher.’
‘I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did
not keep my own counsel. The idea was given up years ago.’
‘I have never forgotten it. It was that which brought me to
this part of the country, and out here to see you to-night.’
‘Come in,’ said Phillotson. ‘And your cousin, too.’
They entered the parlour of the schoolhouse, where there
was a lamp with a paper shade, which threw the light down
on three or four books. Phillotson took it off, so that they
could see each other better, and the rays fell on the nervous
little face and vivacious dark eyes and hair of Sue, on the
earnest features of her cousin, and on the schoolmaster’s
own maturer face and figure, showing him to be a spare and
thoughtful personage of five-and-forty, with a thin-lipped,
somewhat refined mouth, a slightly stooping habit, and a
black frock coat, which from continued frictions shone a
little at the shoulder-blades, the middle of the back, and the
elbows.
The old friendship was imperceptibly renewed, the
schoolmaster speaking of his experiences, and the cousins
of theirs. He told them that he still thought of the church
sometimes, and that though he could not enter it as he had
intended to do in former years he might enter it as a
licentiate.50 Meanwhile, he said, he was comfortable in his
present position, though he was in want of a pupil-teacher.
They did not stay to supper, Sue having to be indoors
before it grew late, and the road was retraced to
Christminster. Though they had talked of nothing more than
general subjects Jude was surprised to find what a
revelation of woman his cousin was to him. She was so
vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in
feeling. An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so
fast that he could hardly keep up with her; and her
sensitiveness on some points was such that it might have
been misread as vanity. It was with heart-sickness he
perceived that, while her sentiments towards him were
those of the frankest friendliness only, he loved her more
than before becoming acquainted with her; and the gloom
of the walk home lay not in the night overhead, but in the
thought of her departure.
‘Why must you leave Christminster?’ he said regretfully.
‘How can you do otherwise than cling to a city in whose
history such men as Newman, Pusey, Ward,51 Keble, loom so
large!’
‘Yes—they do. Though how large do they loom in the
history of the world? … What a funny reason for caring to
stay! I should never have thought of it!’ She laughed.
‘Well—I must go,’ she continued. ‘Miss Fontover, one of
the partners whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with
her; and it is best to go.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘She broke some statuary of mine.’
‘Oh? Wilfully?’
‘Yes. She found it in my room, and though it was my
property she threw it on the floor and stamped on it,
because it was not according to her taste, and ground the
arms and the head of one of the figures all to bits with her
heel—a horrid thing?’
‘Too Catholic-Apostolic for her, I suppose? No doubt she
called them Popish images and talked of the invocation of
saints.’
‘No.… No, she didn’t do that. She saw the matter quite
differently.’
‘Ah! Then I am surprised!’
‘Yes. It was for quite some other reason that she didn’t
like my patron-saints. So I was led to retort upon her; and
the end of it was that I resolved not to stay, but to get into
an occupation in which I shall be more independent.’
‘Why don’t you try teaching again? You once did, I heard.’
‘I never thought of resuming it; for I was getting on as an
art-designer.’
‘Do let me ask Mr. Phillotson to let you try your hand in
his school? If you like it, and go to a Training College, and
become a first-class certificated mistress, you get twice as
large an income as any designer or church artist, and twice
as much freedom.’
‘Well—ask him. Now I must go in. Good-bye, dear Jude! I
am so glad we have met at last. We needn’t quarrel because
our parents did, need we?’
Jude did not like to let her see quite how much he agreed
with her, and went his way to the remote street in which he
had his lodging.
To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which
operated without regard of consequences, and the next
evening he again set out for Lumsdon, fearing to trust to the
persuasive effects of a note only. The schoolmaster was
unprepared for such a proposal.
‘What I rather wanted was second year’s transfer, as it is
called,’ he said. ‘Of course your cousin would do, personally;
but she has had no experience. O—she has, has she? Does
she really think of adopting teaching as a profession?’
 Jude said she was disposed to do so, he thought, and his
ingenious arguments on her natural fitness for assisting Mr.
Phillotson, of which Jude knew nothing whatever, so
influenced the schoolmaster that he said he would engage
her, assuring Jude as a friend that unless his cousin really
meant to follow on in the same course, and regarded this
step as the first stage of an apprenticeship, of which her
training in a normal school would be the second stage, her
time would be wasted quite, the salary being merely
nominal.
The day after this visit Phillotson received a letter from
Jude, containing the information that he had again consulted
his cousin, who took more and more warmly to the idea of
tuition; and that she had agreed to come. It did not occur for
a moment to the schoolmaster and recluse that Jude’s
ardour in promoting the arrangements arose from any other
feelings towards Sue than the instinct of co-operation
common among members of the same family.

II–5
The schoolmaster sat in his homely dwelling attached to the
school, both being modern erections; and he looked across
the way at the old house in which his teacher Sue had a
lodging. The arrangement had been concluded very quickly.
A pupil-teacher who was to have been transferred to Mr.
Phillotson’s school had failed him, and Sue had been taken
as stop-gap. All such provisional arrangements as these
could only last till the next annual visit of H.M. Inspector,
whose approval was necessary to make them permanent.
Having taught for some two years in London, though she
had abandoned that vocation of late, Miss Bridehead was
not exactly a novice, and Phillotson thought there would be
no difficulty in retaining her services, which he already
wished to do, though she had only been with him three or
four weeks. He had found her quite as bright as Jude had
described her; and what master-tradesman does not wish to
keep an apprentice who saves him half his labour?
It was a little over half-past eight o’clock in the morning,
and he was waiting to see her cross the road to the school,
when he would follow. At twenty minutes to nine she did
cross, a light hat tossed on her head; and he watched her as
a curiosity. A new emanation, which had nothing to do with
her skill as a teacher, seemed to surround her this morning.
He went to the school also, and Sue remained governing her
class at the other end of the room, all day under his eye.
She certainly was an excellent teacher.
It was part of his duty to give her private lessons in the
evening, and some article in the Code made it necessary
that a respectable, elderly woman should be present at
these lessons when the teacher and the taught were of
different sexes. Richard Phillotson thought of the absurdity
of the regulation in this case, when he was old enough to be
the girl’s father; but he faithfully acted up to it; and sat
down with her in a room where Mrs. Hawes, the widow at
whose house Sue lodged, occupied herself with sewing. The
regulation was, indeed, not easy to evade, for there was no
other sitting-room in the dwelling.
Sometimes as she figured—it was arithmetic that they
were working at—she would involuntarily glance up with a
little inquiring smile at him, as if she assumed that, being
the master, he must perceive all that was passing in her
brain, as right or wrong. Phillotson was not really thinking of
the arithmetic at all, but of her, in a novel way which
somehow seemed strange to him as preceptor. Perhaps she
knew that he was thinking of her thus.
For a few weeks their work had gone on with a monotony
which in itself was a delight to him. Then it happened that
the children were to be taken to Christminster to see an
itinerant exhibition, in the shape of a model of Jerusalem, to
which schools were admitted at a penny a head in the
interests of education. They marched along the road two
and two, she beside her class with her simple cotton
sunshade, her little thumb cocked up against its stem; and
Phillotson behind in his long dangling coat, handling his
walking-stick genteelly, in the musing mood which had
come over him since her arrival. The afternoon was one of
sun and dust, and when they entered the exhibition room
few people were present but themselves.
The model of the ancient city stood in the middle of the
apartment, and the proprietor, with a fine religious
philanthropy written on his features, walked round it with a
pointer in his hand, showing the young people the various
quarters and places known to them by name from reading
their Bibles; Mount Moriah, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the
City of Zion, the walls and the gates, outside one of which
there was a large mound like a tumulus, and on the mound
a little white cross. The spot, he said, was Calvary.52
‘I think,’ said Sue to the schoolmaster, as she stood with
him a little in the background, ‘that this model, elaborate as
it is, is a very imaginary production. How does anybody
know that Jerusalem was like this in the time of Christ? I am
sure this man doesn’t.’
‘It is made after the best conjectural maps, based on
actual visits to the city as it now exists.’
‘I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem’ she said,
‘considering we are not descended from the Jews. There was
nothing first-rate about the place, or people, after all—as
there was about Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and other old
cities.’
‘But my dear girl, consider what it is to us!’
She was silent, for she was easily repressed; and then
perceived behind the group of children clustered round the
model a young man in a white flannel jacket, his form being
bent so low in his intent inspection of the Valley of
Jehoshaphat that his face was almost hidden from view by
the Mount of Olives. ‘Look at your cousin Jude,’ continued
the schoolmaster. ‘He doesn’t think we have had enough of
Jerusalem!’
‘Ah—I didn’t see him!’ she cried in her quick light voice.
‘Jude—how seriously you are going into it!’
Jude started up from his reverie, and saw her. ‘O—Sue!’
he said, with a glad flush of embarrassment. ‘These are your
school-children, of course! I saw that schools were admitted
in the afternoons, and thought you might come; but I got so
deeply interested that I didn’t remember where I was. How
it carries one back, doesn’t it! I could examine it for hours,
but I have only a few minutes, unfortunately; for I am in the
middle of a job out here.’
‘Your cousin is so terribly clever that she criticizes it
unmercifully,’ said Phillotson, with good-humoured satire.
‘She is quite sceptical as to its correctness.’
‘No, Mr. Phillotson, I am not—altogether! I hate to be what
is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!’
answered Sue sensitively. ‘I only meant—I don’t know what I
meant—except that it was what you don’t understand!’
‘I know your meaning,’ said Jude ardently (although he
did not). ‘And I think you are quite right.’
‘That’s a good Jude—I know you believe in me!’ She
impulsively seized his hand, and leaving a reproachful look
on the schoolmaster turned away to Jude, her voice
revealing a tremor which she herself felt to be absurdly
uncalled for by sarcasm so gentle. She had not the least
conception how the hearts of the twain went out to her at
this momentary revelation of feeling, and what a
complication she was building up thereby in the futures of
both.
The model wore too much of an educational aspect for
the children not to tire of it soon, and a little later in the
afternoon they were all marched back to Lumsdon, Jude
returning to his work. He watched the juvenile flock in their
clean frocks and pinafores, filing down the street towards
the country beside Phillotson and Sue, and a sad,
dissatisfied sense of being out of the scheme of the latters’
lives had possession of him. Phillotson had invited him to
walk out and see them on Friday evening, when there would
be no lessons to give to Sue, and Jude had eagerly promised
to avail himself of the opportunity.
Meanwhile the scholars and teachers moved homewards,
and the next day, on looking on the black-board in Sue’s
class, Phillotson was surprised to find upon it, skilfully drawn
in chalk, a perspective view of Jerusalem, with every
building shown in its place.
‘I thought you took no interest in the model, and hardly
looked at it?’ he said.
‘I hardly did,’ said she, ‘but I remembered that much of
it.’
‘It is more than I had remembered myself.’
Her Majesty’s school-inspector was at that time paying
‘surprise-visits’ in this neighbourhood to test the teaching
unawares; and two days later, in the middle of the morning
lessons, the latch of the door was softly lifted, and in walked
my gentleman, the king of terrors53—to pupil-teachers.
To Mr. Phillotson the surprise was not great; like the lady
in the story he had been played that trick too many times to
be unprepared. But Sue’s class was at the further end of the
room, and her back was towards the entrance; the inspector
therefore came and stood behind her and watched her
teaching some half-minute before she became aware of his
presence. She turned, and realized that an oft-dreaded
moment had come. The effect upon her timidity was such
that she uttered a cry of fright. Phillotson, with a strange
instinct of solicitude quite beyond his control, was at her
side just in time to prevent her falling from faintness. She
soon recovered herself, and laughed; but when the
inspector had gone there was a reaction, and she was so
white that Phillotson took her into his room, and gave her
some brandy to bring her round. She found him holding her
hand.
 ‘You ought to have told me,’ she gasped petulantly, ‘that
one of the Inspector’s surprise-visits was imminent! O what
shall I do! Now he’ll write and tell the managers that I am no
good, and I shall be disgraced for ever!’
‘He won’t do that, my dear little girl. You are the best
teacher ever I had!’
He looked so gently at her that she was moved, and
regretted that she had upbraided him. When she was better
she went home.
Jude in the meantime had been waiting impatiently for
Friday. On both Wednesday and Thursday he had been so
much under the influence of his desire to see her that he
walked after dark some distance along the road in the
direction of the village, and, on returning to his room to
read, found himself quite unable to concentrate his mind on
the page. On Friday, as soon as he had got himself up as he
thought Sue would like to see him, and made a hasty tea, he
set out, notwithstanding that the evening was wet. The
trees overhead deepened the gloom of the hour, and they
dripped sadly upon him, impressing him with forebodings—
illogical forebodings; for though he knew that he loved her
he also knew that he could not be more to her than he was.
On turning the corner and entering the village the first
sight that greeted his eyes was that of two figures under
one umbrella coming out of the vicarage gate. He was too
far back for them to notice him, but he knew in a moment
that they were Sue and Phillotson. The latter was holding
the umbrella over her head, and they had evidently been
paying a visit to the vicar—probably on some business
connected with the school work. And as they walked along
the wet and deserted lane Jude saw Phillotson place his arm
round the girl’s waist; whereupon she gently removed it; but
he replaced it; and she let it remain, looking quickly round
her with an air of misgiving. She did not look absolutely
behind her, and therefore did not see Jude, who sank into
the hedge like one struck with a blight. There he remained
hidden till they had reached Sue’s cottage and she had
passed in, Phillotson going on to the school hard by.
‘O, he’s too old for her—too old!’ cried Jude in all the
terrible sickness of hopeless, handicapped love.
He could not interfere. Was he not Arabella’s? He was
unable to go on further, and retraced his steps towards
Christminster. Every tread of his feet seemed to say to him
that he must on no account stand in the schoolmaster’s way
with Sue. Phillotson was perhaps twenty years her senior,
but many a happy marriage had been made in such
conditions of age. The ironical clinch to his sorrow was given
by the thought that the intimacy between his cousin and
schoolmaster had been brought about entirely by himself.

II–6
Jude’s old and embittered aunt lay unwell at Marygreen, and
on the following Sunday he went to see her—a visit which
was the result of a victorious struggle against his inclination
to turn aside to the village of Lumsdon and obtain a
miserable interview with his cousin, in which the word
nearest his heart could not be spoken, and the sight which
had tortured him could not be revealed.
His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great
part of Jude’s short day was occupied in making
arrangements for her comfort. The little bakery business
had been sold to a neighbour, and with the proceeds of this
and her savings she was comfortably supplied with
necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living
with her and ministering to her wants. It was not till the time
had nearly come for him to leave that he obtained a quiet
talk with her, and his words tended insensibly towards his
cousin.
‘Was Sue born here?’
‘She was—in this room. They were living here at that
time. What made ’ee ask that?’
 ‘O—I wanted to know.’
‘Now you’ve been seeing her!’ said the harsh old woman.
‘And what did I tell ’ee?’
‘Well—that I was not to see her.’
‘Have you gossiped with her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then don’t keep it up. She was brought up by her father
to hate her mother’s family; and she’ll look with no favour
upon a working chap like you—a townish girl as she’s
become by now. I never cared much about her. A pert little
thing, that’s what she was too often, with her tight-strained
nerves. Many’s the time I’ve smacked her for her
impertinence. Why, one day when she was walking into the
pond with her shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats
pulled above her knees, afore I could cry out for shame, she
said: “Move on, aunty! This is no sight for modest eyes!” ’
‘She was a little child then.’
‘She was twelve if a day.’
‘Well—of course. But now she’s older she’s of a
thoughtful, quivering, tender nature, and as sensitive as—’
‘Jude!’ cried his aunt, springing up in bed. ‘Don’t you be a
fool about her!’
‘No, no, of course not.’
‘Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a
thing as a man could possibly do for himself by trying hard.
But she’s gone to the other side of the world, and med
never trouble you again. And there’ll be a worse thing if you,
tied and bound as you be, should have a fancy for Sue. If
your cousin is civil to you, take her civility for what it is
worth. But anything more than a relation’s good wishes it is
stark madness for ’ee to give her. If she’s townish and
wanton it med bring ’ee to ruin.’
‘Don’t say anything against her, aunt! Don’t, please!’
A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the
companion and nurse of his aunt, who must have been
listening to the conversation, for she began a commentary
on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as a character in
her recollections. She described what an odd little maid Sue
had been when a pupil at the village school across the green
opposite, before her father went to London—how, when the
vicar arranged readings and recitations, she appeared on
the platform, the smallest of them all, ‘in her little white
frock, and shoes, and pink sash’; how she recited ‘Excelsior,’
‘There was a sound of revelry by right,’ and ‘The Raven’,54
how during the delivery she would knit her little brows and
glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as if some
real creature stood there—
‘Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven, wandering from the
Nightly shore,
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian
shore!’
‘She’d bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear,’
corroborated the sick woman reluctantly, ‘as she stood there
in her little sash and things, that you could see un a’most
before your very eyes. You too, Jude, had the same trick as a
child of seeming to see things in the air.’
The neighbour told also of Sue’s accomplishments in
other kinds:
‘She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could
do things that only boys do, as a rule. I’ve seen her hit in
and steer down the long slide on yonder pond, with her little
curls blowing, one of a file of twenty moving along against
the sky like shapes painted on glass, and up the back slide
without stopping. All boys except herself; and then they’d
cheer her, and then she’d say, “Don’t be saucy, boys,” and
suddenly run indoors. They’d try to coax her out again. But
’a wouldn’t come.’
These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the
more miserable that he was unable to woo her, and he left
the cottage of his aunt that day with a heavy heart. He
would fain have glanced into the school to see the room in
which Sue’s little figure had so glorified itself; but he
checked his desire and went on.
It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known
him during his residence here were standing in a group in
their best clothes. Jude was startled by a salute from one of
them:
‘Ye’ve got there right enough, then!’
Jude showed that he did not understand.
‘Why, to the seat of l’arning—the “City of Light” you used
to talk to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?’
‘Yes; more!’ cried Jude.
‘When I was there once for an hour I didn’t see much in it
for my part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half
almshouse, and not much going on at that.’
‘You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets
the eye of a man walking through the streets. It is a unique
centre of thought and religion—the intellectual and spiritual
granary of this country. All that silence and absence of
goings-on is the stillness of infinite motion—the sleep of the
spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a well-known writer.’55
‘O, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn’t
see nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in
and had a pot o’ beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha’porth o’
cheese, and waited till it was time to come along home.
You’ve j’ined a College by this time, I suppose?’
‘Ah, no!’ said Jude. ‘I am almost as far off that as ever.’
‘How so?’
Jude slapped his pocket.
‘Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you
—only for them with plenty o’ money.’
‘There you are wrong,’ said Jude, with some bitterness.
‘They are for such ones!’
Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude’s
attention from the imaginative world he had lately
inhabited, in which an abstract figure, more or less himself,
was steeping his mind in a sublimation of the arts and
sciences, and making his calling and election sure to a seat
in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his
prospects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he
could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek—in the Greek of
the dramatists particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes
after his day’s work that he could not maintain the critical
attention necessary for thorough application. He felt that he
wanted a coach—a friend at his elbow to tell him in a
moment what sometimes would occupy him a weary month
in extracting from unanticipative, clumsy books.
It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more
closely than he had done of late. What was the good, after
all, of using up his spare hours in a vague labour called
‘private study’ without giving an outlook on practicabilities?
‘I ought to have thought of this before,’ he said, as he
journeyed back. ‘It would have been better never to have
embarked in the scheme at all than to do it without seeing
clearly where I am going, or what I am aiming at.… This
hovering outside the walls of the colleges, as if expecting
some arm to be stretched out from them to lift me inside,
won’t do! I must get special information.’
The next week accordingly he sought it. What at first
seemed an opportunity occurred one afternoon when he
saw an elderly gentleman, who had been pointed out as the
Head of a particular College, walking in the public path of a
parklike enclosure near the spot at which Jude chanced to
be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and Jude looked
anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet
rather reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could
not go up and address him; but he was sufficiently
influenced by the incident to think what a wise thing it
would be for him to state his difficulties by letter to some of
the best and most judicious of these old masters, and obtain
their advice.
During the next week or two he accordingly placed
himself in such positions about the city as would afford him
glimpses of several of the most distinguished among the
Provosts, Wardens, and other Heads of Houses; and from
those he ultimately selected five whose physiognomies
seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-
seeing men. To these five he addressed letters, briefly
stating his difficulties, and asking their opinion on his
stranded situation.
When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to
criticize them; he wished they had not been sent. ‘It is just
one of those intrusive, vulgar, pushing, applications which
are so common in these days,’ he thought. ‘Why couldn’t I
know better than address utter strangers in such a way? I
may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad
character, for all that they know to the contrary.… Perhaps
that’s what I am!’
Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of
some reply as to his one last chance of redemption. He
waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to
expect, yet expecting. While he waited he was suddenly
stirred by news about Phillotson. Phillotson was giving up
the school near Christminster, for a larger one further south,
in Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would affect his
cousin; whether, as seemed possible, it was a practical
move of the schoolmaster’s toward a larger income, in view
of a provision for two instead of one, he would not allow
himself to say. And the tender relations between Phillotson
and the young girl of whom Jude was passionately
enamoured effectually made it repugnant to Jude’s tastes to
apply to Phillotson for advice on his own scheme.
Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had
written vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus
thrown back entirely on himself, as formerly, with the added
gloom of a weakened hope. By indirect inquiries he soon
perceived clearly, what he had long uneasily suspected, that
to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and
exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to do this a
good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much
natural ability. It was next to impossible that a man reading
on his own system, however widely and thoroughly, even
over the prolonged period of ten years, should be able to
compete with those who had passed their lives under
trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.
The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak,
seemed the only one really open to men like him, the
difficulty being simply of a material kind. With the help of his
information he began to reckon the extent of this material
obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay, that, at the rate at
which, with the best of fortune, he would be able to save
money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a
position to forward testimonials to the Head of a College and
advance to a matriculation examination.56 The undertaking
was hopeless.
He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the
neighbourhood of the place had exercised over him. To get
there and live there, to move among the churches and halls
and become imbued with the genius loci,57 had seemed to
his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its charms to him
from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal thing to
do. ‘Let me only get there,’ he had said with the fatuousness
of Crusoe over his big boat,58 and the rest is but a matter of
time and energy.’ It would have been far better for him in
every way if he had never come within sight and sound of
the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy commercial
town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and
thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that
was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme
had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the
touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along
the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to
Heine’s:
‘Above the youth’s inspired and flashing eyes
 I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise!’59
Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his
disappointment into his dear Sue’s life by involving her in
this collapse. And the painful details of his awakening to a
sense of his limitations should now be spared her as far as
possible. After all, she had only known a little part of the
miserable struggle in which he had been engaged thus
unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.
He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon
on which he awoke from his dream. Not quite knowing what
to do with himself, he went up to an octagonal chamber in
the lantern of a singularly built theatre60 that was set amidst
this quaint and singular city. It had windows all round, from
which an outlook over the whole town and its edifices could
be gained. Jude’s eyes swept all the views in succession,
mediatively, mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings and
their associations and privileges were not for him. From the
looming roof of the great library, into which he hardly ever
had time to enter, his gaze travelled on to the varied spires,
halls, gables, streets, chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which
composed the ensemble of this unrivalled panorama. He
saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among the
manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself
occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its
visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the
hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.
He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the
trees which screened her whose presence had at first been
the support of his heart, and whose loss was now a
maddening torture. But for this blow he might have borne
with his fate. With Sue as companion he could have
renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was
inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he
had subjected himself should affect him disastrously.
Phillotson had no doubt passed through a similar intellectual
disappointment to that which now enveloped him. But the
schoolmaster had been since blest with the consolation of
sweet Sue, while for him there was no consoler.
Descending to the streets, he went listlessly along till he
arrived at an inn, and entered it. Here he drank several
glasses of beer in rapid succession, and when he came out
it was night. By the light of the flickering lamps he rambled
home to supper, and had not long been sitting at table when
his landlady brought up a letter that had just arrived for
him. She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of its
possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that
it bore the embossed stamp of one of the Colleges whose
heads he had addressed. ‘One—at last!’ cried Jude.
The communication was brief, and not exactly what he
had expected; though it really was from the Master in
person. It ran thus:
‘Biblioll College
‘SIR,—I have read your letter with interest; and,
judging from your description of yourself as a working-
man, I venture to think that you will have a much
better chance of success in life by remaining in your
own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting
any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you
to do. Yours faithfully,
‘T. Tetuphenay.’61
‘To Mr. J. Fawley Stone-mason.’
This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had
known all that before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a
hard slap after ten years of labour, and its effect upon him
just now was to make him rise recklessly from the table,
and, instead of reading as usual, to go downstairs and into
the street. He stood at a bar and tossed off two or three
glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he came to
a spot called The Fourways62 in the middle of the city,
gazing abstractedly at the groups of people like one in a
trance, till, coming to himself, he began talking to the
policeman fixed there.
That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated
himself an inch and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled,
and looking humorously at Jude, said, ‘You’ve had a wet,63
young man.’
‘No; I’ve only begun,’ he replied cynically.
Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He
only heard in part the policeman’s further remarks, having
fallen into thought on what struggling people like himself
had stood at that Crossway, whom nobody ever thought of
now. It had more history than the oldest college in the city. It
was literally teeming, stratified, with the shades of human
groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce; real
enactments of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had
stood and talked of Napoleon, the loss of America, the
execution of King Charles, the burning of the Martyrs, the
Crusades, the Norman Conquest, possibly of the arrival of
Caesar. Here the two sexes had met for loving, hating,
coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered, for each other;
had triumphed over each other; cursed each other in
jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.
He began to see that the town life was a book of
humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and
compendious than the gown life. These struggling men
64

and women before him were the reality of Christminster,

though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of
the humours of things. The floating population of students
and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not
Christminster in a local sense at all.
He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he
went on till he came to a public hall, where a promenade
concert65 was in progress. Jude entered, and found the room
full of shop youths and girls, soldiers, apprentices, boys of
eleven smoking cigarettes, and light women of the more
respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the real
Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd
walked about and jostled each other, and every now and
then a man got upon a platform and sang a comic song.
The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent
his flirting and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made
advances—wistful to gain a little joy. At ten o’clock he came
away, choosing a circuitous route homeward to pass the
gates of the College whose Head had just sent him the note.
The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his
pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually
carried there, and wrote along the wall:
‘I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to
you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?’—Job xii.3.

II–7
The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning
he laughed at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a
healthy one. He re-read the letter from the Master, and the
wisdom in its lines, which had at first exasperated him,
chilled and depressed him now. He saw himself as a fool
indeed.
Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he
could not proceed to his work. Whenever he felt reconciled
to his fate as a student, there came to disturb his calm his
hopeless relations with Sue. That the one affined66 soul he
had ever met was lost to him through his marriage returned
upon him with cruel persistency, till, unable to bear it
longer, he again rushed for distraction to the real
Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and
low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to
certain worthies of the place, and in brighter times would
have interested him simply by its quaintness. Here he sat
more or less all the day, convinced that he was at bottom a
vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to expect
anything.
In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in
one by one, Jude still retaining his seat in the corner, though
his money was all spent, and he had not eaten anything the
whole day except a biscuit. He surveyed his gathering
companions with all the equanimity and philosophy of a
man who has been drinking long and slowly, and made
friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed church-
ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in
earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a
red-nosed auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself,
called Uncle Jim and Uncle Joe. There were present, too,
some clerks, and a gown-and surplice-maker’s assistant;
two ladies who sported moral characters of various depths
of shade, according to their company, nicknamed ‘Bower o’
Bliss’ and ‘Freckles’; some horsey men ‘in the know’ of
betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two
devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless67
undergraduates; they had slipped in by stealth to meet a
man about bull-pups, and stayed to drink and smoke short
pipes with the racing gents aforesaid, looking at their
watches every now and then.
The conversation waxed general. Christminster society
was criticized, the Dons, magistrates, and other people in
authority being sincerely pitied for their shortcomings, while
opinions on how they ought to conduct themselves and their
affairs to be properly respected, were exchanged in a large-
minded and disinterested manner.
Jude Fawley, with the self-conceit, effrontery, and aplomb
of a strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks
somewhat peremptorily; and his aims having been what
they were for so many years, everything the others said
turned upon his tongue, by a sort of mechanical craze, to
the subject of scholarship and study, the extent of his own
learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that would
have appeared pitiable to himself in his sane hours.
‘I don’t care a damn,’ he was saying, ‘for any Provost,
Warden, Principal, Fellow, or cursed Master of Arts in the
University! What I know is that I’d lick ’em on their own
ground if they’d give me a chance, and show ’em a few
things they are not up to yet!’
‘Hear, hear!’ said the undergraduates from the corner,
where they were talking privately about the pups.
‘You always was fond o’ books, I’ve heard,’ said Tinker
Taylor, ‘and I don’t doubt what you state: Now with me ’twas
different: I always saw there was more to be learnt outside a
book than in; and I took my steps accordingly, or I shouldn’t
have been the man I am.’
‘You aim at the Church, I believe?’ said Uncle Joe. ‘If you
are such a scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why
not give us a specimen of your scholarship? Canst say the
Creed in Latin, man? That was how they once put it to a
chap down in my country.’
‘I should think so!’ said Jude haughtily.
‘Not he! Like his conceit!’ screamed one of the ladies.
‘Just you shut up, Bower o’ Bliss!’ said one of the
undergraduates. ‘Silence!’ He drank off the spirits in his
tumbler, rapped with it on the counter, and announced. ‘The
gentleman in the corner is going to rehearse the Articles of
his Belief, in the Latin tongue, for the edification of the
company.’
‘I won’t!’ said Jude.
‘Yes—have a try!’ said the surplice-maker.
‘You can’t! said Uncle Joe.
‘Yes, he can!’ said Tinker Taylor.
‘I’ll swear I can!’ said Jude. ‘Well, come now, stand me a
small Scotch cold and I’ll do it straight off.’
‘That’s a fair offer,’ said the undergraduate, throwing
down the money for the whisky.
 The barmaid concocted the mixture with the bearing of a
person compelled to live amongst animals of an inferior
species, and the glass was handed across to Jude, who,
having drunk the contents, stood up and began rhetorically,
without hesitation:
‘Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Factorem
coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.’
‘Good! Excellent Latin!’ cried one of the undergraduates,
who, however, had not the slightest conception of a single
word.
A silence reigned among the rest in the bar, and the maid
stood still, Jude’s voice echoing sonorously into the inner
parlour, where the landlord was dozing, and bringing him
out to see what was going on. Jude had declaimed steadily
ahead, and was continuing:
‘Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et
sepultus est. Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas.’
‘That’s the Nicene,’ sneered the second undergraduate.
‘And we wanted the Apostles’!’68
‘You didn’t say so! And every fool knows, except you, that
the Nicene is the most historic creed!’
‘Let un go on, let un go on!’ said the auctioneer.
But Jude’s mind seemed to grow confused soon, and he
could not get on. He put his hand to his forehead, and his
face assumed an expression of pain.
‘Give him another glass—then he’ll fetch up and get
through it,’ said Tinker Taylor.
Somebody threw down threepence, the glass was handed,
Jude stretched out his arm for it without looking, and having
swallowed the liquor, went on in a moment in a revived
voice, raising it as he neared the end with the manner of a
priest leading a congregation:
‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex
Patre Filioque procedit. Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur
et conglorificatur. Qui locutus est per prophetas.
 ‘Et unam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam. Confitior
unum Baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. Et exspecto
Resurrecti onem mortuorum. Et vitam venturi saeculi.
Amen.’
‘Well done!’ said several, enjoying the last word, as being
the first and only one they had recognized.
Then Jude seemed to shake the fumes from his brain, as
he stared round upon them.
‘You pack of fools!’ he cried. ‘Which one of you knows
whether I have said it or no? It might have been the
Ratcatcher’s Daughter69 in double Dutch for all that your
besotted heads can tell! See what I have brought myself to
—the crew I have come among!’
The landlord, who had already had his license endorsed
for harbouring queer characters, feared a riot, and came
outside the counter; but Jude, in his sudden flash of reason,
had turned in disgust and left the scene, the door slamming
with a dull thud behind him.
He hastened down the lane and round into the straight
broad street, which he followed till it merged in the highway,
and all sound of his late companions had been left behind.
Onward he still went, under the influence of a childlike
yearning for the one being in the world to whom it seemed
possible to fly—an unreasoning desire, whose ill judgment
was not apparent to him now. In the course of an hour, when
it was between ten and eleven o’clock, he entered the
village of Lumsdon, and reaching the cottage, saw that a
light was burning in a downstairs room, which he assumed,
rightly as it happened, to be hers.
Jude stepped close to the wall, and tapped with his finger
on the pane, saying impatiently, ‘Sue, Sue!’
She must have recognized his voice, for the light
disappeared from the apartment, and in a second or two the
door was unlocked and opened, and Sue appeared with a
candle in her hand.
 ‘Is it Jude? Yes, it is! My dear, dear cousin, what’s the
matter?’
‘O, I am—I couldn’t help coming, Sue!’ said he, sinking
down upon the doorstep. ‘I am so wicked, Sue—my heart is
nearly broken, and I could not bear my life as it was! So I
have been drinking, and blaspheming, or next door to it,
and saying holy things in disreputable quarters—repeating
in idle bravado words which ought never to be uttered but
reverently! O, do anything with me, Sue—kill me—I don’t
care! Only don’t hate me and despise me like all the rest of
the world!’
‘You are ill, poor dear! No, I won’t despise you; of course I
won’t. Come in and rest, and let me see what I can do for
you. Now lean on me, and don’t mind.’ With one hand
holding the candle and the other supporting him, she led
him indoors, and placed him in the only easy-chair the
meagrely furnished house afforded, stretching his feet upon
another, and pulling off his boots. Jude, now getting towards
his sober senses, could only say, ‘Dear, dear Sue!’ in a voice
broken by grief and contrition.
She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook
his head. Then telling him to go to sleep, and that she would
come down early in the morning and get him some
breakfast, she bade him good-night and ascended the stairs.
Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did
not wake till dawn. At first he did not know where he was,
but by degrees his situation cleared to him, and he beheld it
in all the ghastliness of a right mind. She knew the worst of
him—the very worst. How could he face her now? She would
soon be coming down to see about breakfast, as she had
said, and there would he be in all his shame confronting her.
He could not bear the thought, and softly drawing on his
boots, and taking his hat from the nail on which she had
hung it, he slipped noiselessly out of the house.
His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and
hide, and perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to
him was Marygreen. He called at his lodging in
Christminster, where he found awaiting him a note of
dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he
turned his back upon the city that had been such a thorn in
his side, and struck southward into Wessex. He had no
money left in his pocket, his small savings, deposited at one
of the banks in Christminster, having fortunately been left
untouched. To get to Marygreen, therefore, his only course
was walking; and the distance being nearly twenty miles, he
had ample time to complete on the way the sobering
process begun in him.
At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston. Here
he pawned his waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a
mile or two, slept under a rick that night. At dawn he rose,
shook off the hayseeds and stems from his clothes, and
started again, breasting the long white road up the hill to
the downs, which had been visible to him a long way off,
and passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had
carved his hopes years ago.
He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at
breakfast. Weary and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed
of his ordinary clearness of brain, he sat down by the well,
thinking as he did so what a poor Christ he made.70 Seeing a
trough of water near he bathed his face, and went on to the
cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found breakfasting in
bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.
‘What—out o’ work?’ asked his relative, regarding him
through eyes sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers,
no other cause for his tumbled appearance suggesting itself
to one whose whole life had been a struggle with material
things.
‘Yes,’ said Jude heavily. ‘I think I must have a little rest:’
Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room
and lay down in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the
artizan. He fell asleep for a short while, and when he awoke
it was as if he had awakened in hell. It was hell—‘the hell of
conscious failure,’ both in ambition and in love. He thought
of that previous abyss into which he had fallen before
leaving this part of the country; the deepest deep he had
supposed it then; but it was not so deep as this. That had
been the breaking in of the outer bulwarks of his hope: this
was of his second line.
If he had been a woman he must have screamed under
the nervous tension which he was now undergoing. But that
relief being denied to his virility, he clenched his teeth in
misery, bringing lines about his mouth like those in the
Laocoön,71 and corrugations between his brows.
A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in
the chimney like the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf
overgrowing the wall of the churchless churchyard hard by,
now abandoned, pecked its neighbour smartly, and the vane
on the new Victorian-Gothic church in the new spot had
already begun to creak. Yet apparently it was not always the
outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice.
He guessed its origin in a moment or two; the curate was
praying with his aunt in the adjoining room. He remembered
her speaking of him. Presently the sound ceased, and a step
seemed to cross the landing. Jude sat up, and shouted ‘Hoi!’
The step made for his door, which was open, and a man
looked in. It was a young clergyman.
‘I think you are Mr. Highridge,’ said Jude. ‘My aunt has
mentioned you more than once. Well, here I am, just come
home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best
intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy
mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.’
Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and
movements by an unconscious bias dwelling less upon the
intellectual and ambitious side of his dream, and more upon
the theological, though this had, up till now, been merely a
portion of the general plan of advancement.
‘Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me,’
added Jude in conclusion. ‘And I don’t regret the collapse of
my University hopes one jot. I wouldn’t begin again if I were
sure to succeed. I don’t care for social success any more at
all. But I do feel I should like to do some good thing; and I
bitterly regret the Church, and the loss of my chance of
being her ordained minister.’
The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood,
had grown deeply interested, and at last he said: ‘If you feel
a real call to the ministry, and I won’t say from your
conversation that you do not, for it is that of a thoughtful
and educated man, you might enter the Church as a
licentiate. Only you must make up your mind to avoid strong
drink.’
‘I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope
to support me!’
 1. Based on the university city of Oxford.
2. From the “Prelude” to Songs before Sunrise (1871), by Algernon Charles
Swinburne (1837–1909), one of Hardy’s favorite poets.
3. “Closeness led to awareness and the first steps; love grew with time”
(Metamorphoses 4.59–60). Ovid was a Latin poet.
4. Jude’s features recall Hardy in his twenties.
5. Probably in the sense of “enlivening, vivifying” rather than “accelerating.”
6. According to a popular legend, Whittington was a poor boy who went to
London to seek his fortune, prospered in business ventures, and became lord
mayor.
7. Town on Lake Galilee, prominent in the Gospels. Hardy’s manuscript shows
that he first wrote “Capernaum,” the scene of Christ’s Galilean ministry: Jesus
spoke of the lack of faith of the people of Capernaum (Matthew 11.23). It
corresponds to Oxford’s Jericho district.
8. “The Great Tom [in Christ Church, Hardy’s “Cardinal College”], one of the
largest bells in England … is tolled every evening at ten minutes past nine
o’clock, one hundred and one times … at the closing of college gates” (The
Oxford University and City Guide, 1860).
9. Decorated with Gothic ornaments.
10. Projecting rooms or recesses with windows.
11. Ben Jonson (1572–1637). (A key to this and the next eighteen names alluded
to is given by Hardy in a letter to Mrs. Henniker dated November 10, 1895.
See Collected Letters II, p. 95.)
12. Robert Browning. Hardy noted Browning’s death in his diary on December
13, 1889.
13. Swinburne.
14. John Henry Newman (1801–1890), John Keble (1792–1866), and Edward
Pusey (1800–1882), leaders of the Tractarian Movement (see here).
15. Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751) is the “sceptic.”
16. Hardy’s key has “can’t remember!” against this reference. The most likely
candidate is Newman: his autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua, has a Latin
title but is written in English; it has been suggested that the work referred to
may be the Dissertatiunculae quaedam critico-theologicae (1847).
17. Bishop Ken (1637–1711).
18. John Wesley (1703–1791).
19. The words quoted appear in the preface to Matthew Arnold’s Essays in
Criticism: First Series (1865).
20. Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850); the speech quoted from was delivered in the
House of Commons on May 15, 1846, when Peel was prime minister.
21. Gibbon; the chapter referred to is chap. 15 of the Decline and Fall.
22. Robert Browning; the lines quoted are from “By the Fire-side.”
23. Newman, whose autobiography is titled Apologia pro vita sua (1864).
24. Keble; the quotation is from his popular collection of devotional poems, The
Christian Year (1827).
25. Joseph Addison (1672–1719); the sentence quoted (slightly inaccurately) is
from his Spectator no. 26.
26. Bishop Ken; the lines are from his famous “Evening Hymn.”
27. Stone benches used by masons. “Traceries”: interlaced stonework on a
Gothic window or vault. “Transoms”: horizontal bars of stone across mullioned
windows. “Shafts”: slender stone columns.
28. A projection sticking out from a wall and supporting some weight above it; it
is often carved in the form of a head. “Gurgoyles”: i.e., gargoyles: projecting
spouts, often in the form of grotesque human or animal figures, to carry
rainwater clear of the walls of a building.
29. Quoted from the Book of Common Prayer.
30. Curved in an S shape.
31. Ecclesiastes 7.12.
32. Contemptuous term for religious rituals (the original meaning is “play
acting”).
33. Books, often illustrated, used in celebrating the Roman Catholic mass.
34. Speak, shout (dialect).
35. The upper part of a church, above the arches of the nave, containing
windows.
36. Ancient type of church music, also known as plainsong, named after Pope
Gregory I. “In quo corriget”: the opening words of the Latin version of Psalms
119.9.
37. A high mountain, which was the scene of Christ’s transfiguration (see Mark
9.2–9; also Psalms 133.3).
38. According to Greek legend, Aphrodite, goddess of love, emerged from the
sea and landed at Paphos in Cyprus. Cyprus and Galilee here stand,
respectively, for physical and spiritual love.
39. Many plaster statuette makers were immigrants from Tuscany.
40. I.e., cow parsley, also known as Queen Anne’s lace, has leaves up to thirty
centimeters in length. “Burdock leaves” may grow to seventy centimeters in
length.
41. An expert in High Church forms of worship (the High Anglican and Anglo-
Catholic wings of the Church of England stressed ritual and ceremony).
42. John Keble’s collection of poems.
43. Chap. 23 of the Decline and Fall. The Roman emperor Julian announced his
conversion to paganism in 361. Sue displays a certain daring in reading this
particular chapter.
44. From Swinburne’s “Hymn to Prosperpine.” “Pale Galilean”: Christ. The
reference is to Julian’s supposed dying words: “Vicisti, Galilaee” (“Thou hast
conquered, O Galilean”).
45. A verse from the Greek New Testament: “But to us there is but one God, the
Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by
whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Corinthians 8.6).
46. Literally a “love seizure.” Hardy appears to have invented the word.
47. Its equivalent is St. Barnabas, in Oxford’s Jericho, which was built in 1868–
69. See here.
48. Of Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Cranmer, Protestant bishops,
who were put to death in 1555–56 during the reign of the Roman Catholic
Mary I.
49. Modeled on Cumnor, a village outside Oxford, the setting of Matthew
Arnold’s poem “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1852–53).
50. One holding a license to preach, as opposed to an ordained clergyman.
51. W. G. Ward (1812–1882), theological writer.
52. Scene of Christ’s crucifixion.
53. The phrase is normally applied to death.
54. Poems by, respectively, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Byron, and Edgar
Allan Poe.
55. From Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–34), chap. 3.
56. Examination for admission to the university.
57. Spirit of the place.
58. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the hero builds a boat with great toil, only to find
that it is too heavy for him to move to the water.
59. Translation of lines from the poem “Götterdämmerung” by the German poet
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).
60. The Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren, is not a theater in
the usual sense but a building in which university ceremonies take place. It is
the scene of the annual commemoration, at which degrees are granted.
61. It has been suggested that Tetuphenay (whose name is based on a Greek
verb meaning “to have struck”) was modeled on Benjamin Jowett, famous
classical scholar and master of Balliol College, Oxford. It has also been
claimed that the letter received by Jude is a transcript of a letter sent to the
young Hardy by Jowett.
62. Carfax, “a place where the four ways meet” (The Visitor’s Guide to Oxford,
1881).
63. Had too much to drink.
64. The life of the university, as opposed to “town” life, that of the other
residents of the city.
65. Concert at which the audience could stroll about freely.
66. Connected by affinity of some kind.
67. Undergraduates were required by university regulations to wear academic
gowns after dark.
68. The Nicene and the Apostles’ Creeds are declarations of faith originating
from the early Christian church.
69. Popular 19th-century street ballad; its words are given in The Oxford Book of
Light Verse, ed. W. H. Auden (1938), no. 237.
70. The reference is to John 4.6, where Christ sits “on the well.”
71. Famous Roman sculpture, showing struggling figures.

Part Third: At Melchester

‘For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her!’
 —Sappho (H. T. Wharton)1

III–1
It was a new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as
distinct from the intellectual and emulative life. A man could
preach and do good to his fellow-creatures without taking
double-firsts in the schools of Christminster, or having
anything but ordinary knowledge. The old fancy which had
led on to the culminating vision of the bishopric had not
been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but a
mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared
that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it
might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no
foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an
artificial product of civilization. There were thousands of
young men on the same self-seeking track at the present
moment. The sensual hind who ate, drank, and lived
carelessly with his wife through the days of his vanity2 was a
more likable being than he.
But to enter the Church in such an unscholarly way that
he could not in any probability rise to a higher grade
through all his career than that of the humble curate
wearing his life out in an obscure village or city slum—that
might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that
might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of
being followed by a remorseful man.
The favourable light in which this new thought showed
itself by contrast with his foregone intentions cheered Jude,
as he sat there, shabby and lonely; and it may be said to
have given, during the next few days, the coup de grâce3 to
his intellectual career—a career which had extended over
the greater part of a dozen years. He did nothing, however,
for some long stagnant time to advance his new desire,
occupying himself with little local jobs in putting up and
lettering headstones about the neighbouring villages, and
submitting to be regarded as a social failure, a returned
purchase, by the half-dozen or so of farmers and other
country-people who condescended to nod to him.
The human interest of the new intention—and a human
interest is indispensable to the most spiritual and self-
sacrificing—was created by a letter from Sue, bearing a
fresh postmark. She evidently wrote with anxiety, and told
very little about her own doings, more than that she had
passed some sort of examination for a Queen’s Scholarship,4
and was going to enter a Training College at Melchester to
complete herself for the vocation she had chosen, partly by
his influence. There was a Theological College at
Melchester; Melchester was a quiet and soothing place,
almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where
worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no
establishment; where the altruistic feeling that he did
possess would perhaps be more highly estimated than a
brilliancy which he did not.
As it would be necessary that he should continue for a
time to work at his trade while reading up Divinity, which he
had neglected at Christminster for the ordinary classical
grind, what better course for him than to get employment at
the further city, and pursue this plan of reading? That his
excessive human interest in the new place was entirely of
Sue’s making, while at the same time Sue was to be
regarded even less than formerly as proper to create it, had
an ethical contradictoriness to which he was not blind. But
that much he conceded to human frailty, and hoped to learn
to love her only as a friend and kinswoman.
He considered that he might so mark out his coming
years as to begin his ministry at the age of thirty—an age
which much attracted him as being that of his exemplar5
when he first began to teach in Galilee. This would allow him
plenty of time for deliberate study, and for acquiring capital
by his trade to help his aftercourse6 of keeping the
necessary terms at a Theological College.
Christmas had come and passed, and Sue had gone to the
Melchester Normal School.7 The time was just the worst in
the year for Jude to get into new employment, and he had
written suggesting to her that he should postpone his arrival
for a month or so, till the days had lengthened. She had
acquiesced so readily that he wished he had not proposed it
—she had never once reproached him for his strange
conduct in coming to her that night, and his silent
disappearance. Neither had she ever said a word about her
relations with Mr. Phillotson.
Suddenly, however, quite a passionate letter arrived from
Sue. She was quite lonely and miserable, she told him. She
hated the place she was in; it was worse than the
ecclesiastical designer’s; worse than anywhere. She felt
utterly friendless; could he come immediately?—though
when he did come she would only be able to see him at
limited times, the rules of the establishment she found
herself in being strict to a degree. It was Mr. Phillotson who
had advised her to come there, and she wished she had
never listened to him.
Phillotson’s suit was not exactly prospering, evidently;
and Jude felt unreasonably glad. He packed up his things
and went to Melchester with a lighter heart than he had
known for months.
This being the turning over a new leaf he duly looked
about for a temperance hotel,8 and found a little
establishment of that description in the street leading from
the station. When he had had something to eat he walked
out into the dull winter light over the town bridge, and
turned the corner towards the Close. The day was foggy,
and standing under the walls of the most graceful
architectural pile in England9 he paused and looked up. The
lofty building was visible as far as the roof-ridge; above, the
dwindling spire rose more and more remotely, till its apex
was quite lost in the mist drifting across it.
 The lamps now began to be lighted, and turning to the
west front he walked round. He took it as a good omen that
numerous blocks of stone were lying about, which signified
that the cathedral was undergoing restoration or repair to a
considerable extent. It seemed to him, full of the
superstitions of his beliefs, that this was an exercise of
forethought on the part of a ruling Power, that he might find
plenty to do in the art he practised while waiting for a call to
higher labours.
Then a wave of warmth came over him as he thought how
near he now stood to the bright-eyed vivacious girl with the
broad forehead and pile of dark hair above it; the girl with
the kindling glance, daringly soft at times—sometimes like
that of the girls he had seen in engravings from paintings of
the Spanish school.10 She was here—actually in this Close—
in one of the houses confronting this very west façade.
He went down the broad gravel path towards the building.
It was an ancient edifice of the fifteenth century, once a
palace, now a training-school, with mullioned and
transomed windows, and a courtyard in front shut in from
the road by a wall. Jude opened the gate and went up to the
door through which, on inquiring for his cousin, he was
gingerly admitted to a waiting-room, and in a few minutes
she came.
Though she had been here such a short while, she was
not as he had seen her last. All her bounding manner was
gone; her curves of motion had become subdued lines. The
screens and subtleties of convention had likewise
disappeared. Yet neither was she quite the woman who had
written the letter that summoned him. That had plainly been
dashed off in an impulse which second thoughts had
somewhat regretted; thoughts that were possibly of his
recent self-disgrace. Jude was quite overcome with emotion.
‘You don’t—think me a demoralized wretch—for coming to
you as I was—and going so shamefully, Sue?’
 ‘O, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know
what had caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of
your worthiness, my poor Jude! And I am glad you have
come!’
She wore a murrey-coloured11 gown with a little lace
collar. It was made quite plain, and hung about her slight
figure with clinging gracefulness. Her hair, which formerly
she had worn according to the custom of the day, was now
twisted up tightly, and she had altogether the air of a
woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an under-
brightness shining through from the depths which that
discipline had not yet been able to reach.
She had come forward prettily; but Jude felt that she had
hardly expected him to kiss her, as he was burning to do,
under other colours than those of cousinship. He could not
perceive the least sign that Sue regarded him as a lover, or
ever would do so, now that she knew the worst of him, even
if he had the right to behave as one; and this helped on his
growing resolve to tell her of his matrimonial entanglement,
which he had put off doing from time to time in sheer dread
of losing the bliss of her company.
Sue came out into the town with him, and they walked
and talked with tongues centred only on the passing
moments. Jude said he would like to buy her a little present
of some sort, and then she confessed, with something of
shame, that she was dreadfully hungry. They were kept on
very short allowances in the College, and a dinner, tea, and
supper all in one was the present she most desired in the
world. Jude thereupon took her to an inn and ordered
whatever the house afforded, which was not much. The
place, however, gave them a delightful opportunity for a
tête-à-tête, nobody else being in the room, and they talked
freely.
She told him about the school as it was at that date, and
the rough living, and the mixed character of her fellow-
students, gathered together from all parts of the diocese,
and how she had to get up and work by gas-light in the
early morning, with all the bitterness of a young person to
whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but it was
not what he wanted especially to know—her relations with
Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had
sat and eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers;
she looked up and smiled, and took his quite freely into her
own little soft one, dividing his fingers and coolly examining
them, as if they were the fingers of a glove she was
purchasing.
‘Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all
day.’
‘I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a
man’s hands subdued to what he works in.12 … Well, I’m
rather glad I came to this Training-School, after all. See how
independent I shall be after the two years’ training! I shall
pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr. Phillotson will use his
influence to get me a big school.’
She had touched the subject at last. ‘I had a suspicion, a
fear,’ said Jude, ‘that he—cared about you rather warmly,
and perhaps wanted to marry you.’
‘Now don’t be such a silly boy!’
‘He has said something about it, I expect.’
‘If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!’
‘O, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw
him doing—’
‘Not kissing me—that I’m certain!’
‘No. But putting his arm round your waist.’
‘Ah—I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.’
‘You are wriggling out of it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!’
Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to
blink, at something this reproof was deciding her to say.
‘I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s
why I don’t want to!’
 ‘Very well, then, dear,’ he said soothingly. ‘I have no real
right to ask you, and I don’t wish to know.’
‘I shall tell you!’ said she, with the perverseness that was
part of her. ‘This is what I have done: I have promised—I
have promised—that I will marry him when I come out of the
Training-School two years hence, and have got my
Certificate; his plan being that we shall then take a large
double school in a great town—he the boys’ and I the
girls’—as married school-teachers often do, and make a
good income between us.’
‘O, Sue! … But of course it is right—you couldn’t have
done better!’
He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his
own belying his words. Then he drew his hand quite away
from hers, and turned his face in estrangement from her to
the window. Sue regarded him passively without moving.
‘I knew you would be angry!’ she said with an air of no
emotion whatever. ‘Very well—I am wrong, I suppose! I
ought not to have let you come to see me! We had better
not meet again; and we’ll only correspond at long intervals,
on purely business matters!’
This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear,
as she probably knew, and it brought him round at once. ‘O
yes, we will,’ he said quickly. ‘Your being engaged can make
no difference to me whatever. I have a perfect right to see
you when I want to; and I shall!’
‘Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling
our evening together. What does it matter about what one is
going to do two years hence!’
She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the
subject drift away. ‘Shall we go and sit in the Cathedral?’ he
asked, when their meal was finished.
‘Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway
station,’ she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her
voice. ‘That’s the centre of the town life now. The Cathedral
has had its day!’
 ‘How modern you are!’
‘So would you be if you had lived so much in the Middle
Ages as I have done these last few years! The Cathedral was
a very good place four or five centuries ago; but it is played
out now.… I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than
mediævalism, if you only knew.’
Jude looked distressed.
‘There—I won’t say any more of that!’ she cried. ‘Only you
don’t know how bad I am, from your point of view, or you
wouldn’t think so much of me, or care whether I was
engaged or not. Now there’s just time for us to walk round
the Close, then I must go in, or I shall be locked out for the
night.’
He took her to the gate and they parted. Jude had a
conviction that his unhappy visit to her on that sad night
had precipitated this marriage engagement, and it did
anything but add to his happiness. Her reproach had taken
that shape, then, and not the shape of words. However, next
day he set about seeking employment, which it was not so
easy to get as at Christminster, there being, as a rule, less
stone-cutting in progress in this quiet city, and hands being
mostly permanent. But he edged himself in by degrees. His
first work was some carving at the cemetery on the hill; and
ultimately he became engaged on the labour he most
desired—the Cathedral repairs, which were very extensive,
the whole interior stonework having been overhauled, to be
largely replaced by new.
It might be a labour of years to get it all done, and he had
confidence enough in his own skill with the mallet and chisel
to feel that it would be a matter of choice with himself how
long he would stay.
The lodgings he took near the Close Gate would not have
disgraced a curate, the rent representing a higher
percentage on his wages than mechanics of any sort usually
care to pay. His combined bed and sitting room was
furnished with framed photographs of the rectories and
deaneries at which his landlady had lived as trusted servant
in her time, and the parlour downstairs bore a clock on the
mantelpiece inscribed to the effect that it was presented to
the same serious-minded woman by her fellow-servants on
the occasion of her marriage. Jude added to the furniture of
his room by unpacking photographs of the ecclesiastical
carvings and monuments that he had executed with his own
hands; and he was deemed a satisfactory acquisition as
tenant of the vacant apartment.
He found an ample supply of theological books in the city
bookshops, and with these his studies were recommenced in
a different spirit and direction from his former course. As a
relaxation from the Fathers, and such stock works as Paley
and Butler,13 he read Newman, Pusey, and many other
modern lights. He hired a harmonium, set it up in his
lodging, and practised chants thereon, single and double.

III–2
‘To-morrow is our grand day, you know. Where shall we go?’
‘I have leave from three till nine. Wherever we can get to
and come back from in that time. Not ruins, Jude—I don’t
care for them.’
‘Well—Wardour Castle.14 And then we can do Fonthill15 if
we like—all in the same afternoon.’
‘Wardour is Gothic ruins—and I hate Gothic!’
‘No. Quite otherwise. It is a classic building—Corinthian,16
I think; with a lot of pictures.’
‘Ah—that will do. I like the sound of Corinthian. We’ll go.’
Their conversation had run thus some few weeks later,
and next morning they prepared to start. Every detail of the
outing was a facet reflecting a sparkle to Jude, and he did
not venture to meditate on the life of inconsistency he was
leading. His Sue’s conduct was one lovely conundrum to
him; he could say no more.
 There duly came the charm of calling at the College door
for her; her emergence in a nunlike simplicity of costume
that was rather enforced than desired; the traipsing along to
the station, the porters’ ‘B’your leave!’ the screaming of the
trains—everything formed the basis of a beautiful
crystallization. Nobody stared at Sue, because she was so
plainly dressed, which comforted Jude in the thought that
only himself knew the charms those habiliments subdued. A
matter of ten pounds spent in a drapery-shop, which had no
connection with her real life or her real self, would have set
all Melchester staring. The guard of the train thought they
were lovers, and put them into a compartment all by
themselves.
‘That’s a good intention wasted!’ said she.
Jude did not respond. He thought the remark
unnecessarily cruel, and partly untrue.
They reached the Park and Castle and wandered through
the picture-galleries, Jude stopping by preference in front of
the devotional pictures by Del Sarto, Guido Reni,
Spagnoletto, Sassoferrato, Carlo Dolci, and others.17 Sue
paused patiently beside him, and stole critical looks into his
face as, regarding the Virgins, Holy Families, and Saints, it
grew reverent and abstracted. When she had thoroughly
estimated him at this, she would move on and wait for him
before a Lely or Reynolds.18 It was evident that her cousin
deeply interested her, as one might be interested in a man
puzzling out his way along a labyrinth from which one had
one’s self escaped.
When they came out a long time still remained to them,
and Jude proposed that as soon as they had had something
to eat they should walk across the high country to the north
of their present position, and intercept the train of another
railway leading back to Melchester, at a station about seven
miles off. Sue, who was inclined for any adventure that
would intensify the sense of her day’s freedom, readily
agreed; and away they went, leaving the adjoining station
behind them.
It was indeed open country, wide and high. They talked
and bounded on, Jude cutting from a little covert a long
walking-stick for Sue as tall as herself, with a great crook,
which made her look like a shepherdess. About half-way on
their journey they crossed a main road running due east and
west—the old road from London to Land’s End. They paused,
and looked up and down it for a moment, and remarked
upon the desolation which had come over this once lively
thoroughfare, while the wind dipped to earth and scooped
straws and hay-stems from the ground.
They crossed the road and passed on, but during the next
half-mile Sue seemed to grow tired, and Jude began to be
distressed for her. They had walked a good distance
altogether, and if they could not reach the other station it
would be rather awkward. For a long time there was no
cottage visible on the wide expanse of down and turnip-
land; but presently they came to a sheepfold, and next to
the shepherd, pitching hurdles. He told them that the only
house near was his mother’s and his, pointing to a little dip
ahead from which a faint blue smoke arose, and
recommended them to go on and rest there.
This they did, and entered the house, admitted by an old
woman without a single tooth, to whom they were as civil as
strangers can be when their only chance of rest and shelter
lies in the favour of the householder.
‘A nice little cottage,’ said Jude.
‘O, I don’t know about the niceness. I shall have to thatch
it soon, and where the thatch is to come from I can’t tell, for
straw do get that dear, that ’twill soon be cheaper to cover
your house wi’ chainey19 plates than thatch.’
They sat resting, and the shepherd came in. ‘Don’t ’ee
mind I,’ he said with a deprecating wave of the hand; ‘bide
here as long as ye will. But mid you be thinking o’ getting
back to Melchester to-night by train? Because you’ll never
do it in this world, since you don’t know the lie of the
country. I don’t mind going with ye some o’ the ways, but
even then the train mid be gone.’
They started up.
‘You can bide here, you know, over the night—can’t em,
mother? The place is welcome to ye. ’Tis hard lying, rather,
but volk may do worse.’ He turned to Jude and asked
privately: ‘Be you a married couple?’
‘Hsh—no!’ said Jude.
‘O—I meant nothing ba’dy—not I! Well then, she can go
into mother’s room, and you and I can lie in the outer
chimmer20 after they’ve gone through. I can call ye soon
enough to catch the first train back. You’ve lost this one
now.’
On consideration they decided to close with this offer, and
drew up and shared with the shepherd and his mother the
boiled bacon and greens for supper.
‘I rather like this,’ said Sue, while their entertainers were
clearing away the dishes. ‘Outside all laws except
gravitation and germination.’
‘You only think you like it; you don’t: you are quite a
product of civilization,’ said Jude, a recollection of her
engagement reviving his soreness a little.
‘Indeed I am not, Jude. I like reading and all that, but I
crave to get back to the life of my infancy and its freedom.’
‘Do you remember it so well? You seem to me to have
nothing unconventional at all about you.’
‘O, haven’t I! You don’t know what’s inside me.’
‘What?’
‘The Ishmaelite.’21
‘An urban miss is what you are.’
She looked severe disagreement, and turned away.
The shepherd aroused them the next morning, as he had
said. It was bright and clear, and the four miles to the train
were accomplished pleasantly. When they had reached
Melchester, and walked to the Close, and the gables of the
old building in which she was again to be immured rose
before Sue’s eyes, she looked a little scared. ‘I expect I shall
catch it!’ she murmured.
They rang the great bell and waited.
‘O, I bought something for you, which I had nearly
forgotten,’ she said quickly, searching her pocket. ‘It is a
new little photograph of me. Would you like it?’
‘Would I!’ He took it gladly, and the porter came. There
seemed to be an ominous glance on his face when he
opened the gate. She passed in, looking back at Jude, and
waving her hand.

III–3
The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from
nineteen to one-and-twenty, though several were older, who
at this date filled the species of nunnery known as the
Training-School at Melchester, formed a very mixed
community, which included the daughters of mechanics,
curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairymen,
soldiers, sailors, and villagers. They sat in the large school-
room of the establishment on the evening previously
described, and word was passed round that Sue Bridehead
had not come in at closing-time.
‘She went out with her young man,’ said a second-year’s
student, who knew about young men. ‘And Miss Traceley
saw her at the station with him. She’ll have it hot when she
does come.’
‘She said he was her cousin,’ observed a youthful new
girl.
‘That excuse has been made a little too often in this
school to be effectual in saving our souls,’ said the head girl
of the year, drily.
The fact was that, only twelve months before, there had
occurred a lamentable seduction of one of the pupils, who
had made the same statement in order to gain meetings
with her lover. The affair had created a scandal, and the
management had consequently been rough on cousins ever
since.
At nine o’ clock the names were called, Sue’s being
pronounced three times sonorously by Miss Traceley without
eliciting an answer.
At a quarter past nine the seventy stood up to sing the
‘Evening Hymn,’ and then knelt down to prayers. After
prayers they went in to supper, and every girl’s thought
was, Where is Sue Bridehead? Some of the students, who
had seen Jude from the window, felt that they would not
mind risking her punishment for the pleasure of being kissed
by such a kindly-faced young man. Hardly one among them
believed in the cousinship.
Half-an-hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their
tender feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which
at intervals stretched down the long dormitories every face
bearing the legend ‘The Weaker’ upon it, as the penalty of
the sex wherein they were moulded, which by no possible
exertion of their willing hearts and abilities could be made
strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what they
are. They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of
whose pathos and beauty they were themselves
unconscious, and would not discover till, amid the storms
and strains of after-years, with their injustice, loneliness,
child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds would revert to
this experience as to something which had been allowed to
slip past them insufficiently regarded.
One of the mistresses came in to turn out the lights, and
before doing so gave a final glance at Sue’s cot, which
remained empty, and at her little dressing-table at the foot,
which, like all the rest, was ornamented with various girlish
trifles, framed photographs being not the least conspicuous
among them. Sue’s table had a moderate show, two men in
their filigree and velvet frames standing together beside her
looking-glass.
 ‘Who are these men—did she ever say?’ asked the
mistress. ‘Strictly speaking, relations’ portraits only are
allowed on these tables, you know.’
‘One—the middle-aged man,’ said a student in the next
bed—‘is the schoolmaster she served under—Mr. Phillotson.’
‘And the outer—this undergraduate in cap and gown—
who is he?’
‘He is a friend, or was. She has never told his name.’
‘Was it either of these two who came for her?’
‘No.’
‘You are sure ’twas not the undergraduate?’
‘Quite. He was a young man with a black beard.’
The lights were promptly extinguished, and till they fell
asleep the girls indulged in conjectures about Sue, and
wondered what games she had carried on in London and at
Christminster before she came here, some of the more
restless ones getting out of bed and looking from the
mullioned windows at the vast west front of the Cathedral
opposite, and the spire rising behind it.
When they awoke the next morning they glanced into
Sue’s nook, to find it still without a tenant. After the early
lessons by gas-light, in half-toilet, and when they had come
up to dress for breakfast, the bell of the entrance gate was
heard to ring loudly. The mistress of the dormitory went
away, and presently came back to say that the Principal’s
orders were that nobody was to speak to Bridehead without
permission.
When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily
tidy herself, looking flushed and tired, she went to her
cubicle in silence, none of them coming out to greet her or
to make inquiry. When they had gone downstairs they found
that she did not follow them into the dining-hall to
breakfast, and they then learnt that she had been severely
reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week,
there to be confined, and take her meals, and do all her
reading.
 At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they
thought, too severe. A round robin22 was prepared and sent
in to the Principal, asking for a remission of Sue’s
punishment. No notice was taken. Towards evening, when
the geography mistress began dictating her subject, the
girls in the class sat with folded arms.
‘You mean that you are not going to work?’ said the
mistress at last. ‘I may as well tell you that it has been
ascertained that the young man Bridehead stayed out with
was not her cousin, for the very good reason that she has no
such relative. We have written to Christminster to ascertain.’
‘We are willing to take her word,’ said the head girl.
‘This young man was discharged from his work at
Christminster for drunkenness and blasphemy in public-
houses, and he has come here to live, entirely to be near
her.’
However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the
mistress left the room to inquire from her superiors what
was to be done.
Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard
exclamations from the first-year’s girls in an adjoining class-
room, and one rushed in to say that Sue Bridehead had got
out of the back window of the room in which she had been
confined, escaped in the dark across the lawn, and
disappeared. How she had managed to get out of the
garden nobody could tell, as it was bounded by the river at
the bottom, and the side door was locked.
They went and looked at the empty room, the casement
between the middle mullions of which stood open. The lawn
was again searched with a lantern, every bush and shrub
being examined, but she was nowhere hidden. Then the
porter of the front gate was interrogated, and on reflection
he said that he remembered hearing a sort of splashing in
the stream at the back, but he had taken no notice, thinking
some ducks had come down the river from above.
‘She must have walked through the river!’ said a mistress.
 ‘Or drowned herself,’ said the porter.
The mind of the matron was horrified—not so much at the
possible death of Sue as at the possible half-column
detailing that event in all the newspapers, which, added to
the scandal of the year before, would give the College an
unenviable notoriety for many months to come.
More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and
then, at last, on the opposite shore, which was open to the
fields, some little boot-tracks were discerned in the mud,
which left no doubt that the too excitable girl had waded
through a depth of water reaching nearly to her shoulders—
for this was the chief river of the county, and was
mentioned in all the geography books with respect. As Sue
had not brought disgrace upon the school by drowning
herself, the matron began to speak superciliously of her,
and to express gladness that she was gone.
On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the
Close Gate. Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the
silent Close, and stand opposite the house that contained
Sue, and watch the shadows of the girls’ heads passing to
and fro upon the blinds, and wish he had nothing else to do
but to sit reading and learning all day what many of the
thoughtless inmates despised. But to-night, having finished
tea and brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of
the Twenty-ninth Volume of Pusey’s Library of the Fathers, a
set of books which he had purchased of a second-hand
dealer at a price that seemed to him to be one of
miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work.23 He fancied
he heard something rattle lightly against his window; then
he heard it again. Certainly somebody had thrown gravel.
He rose and gently lifted the sash.
‘Jude!’ (from below).
‘Sue!’
‘Yes—it is! Can I come up without being seen?’
‘O yes!’
‘Then don’t come down. Shut the window.’
 Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough,
the front door being opened merely by a knob which
anybody could turn, as in most old country towns. He
palpitated at the thought that she had fled to him in her
trouble as he had fled to her in his. What counterparts they
were! He unlatched the door of his room, heard a stealthy
rustle on the dark stairs, and in a moment she appeared in
the light of his lamp. He went up to seize her hand, and
found she was clammy as a marine deity, and that her
clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the
Parthenon frieze.24
‘I’m so cold!’ she said through her chattering teeth. ‘Can I
come by your fire, Jude?’
She crossed to his little grate and very little fire, but as
the water dripped from her as she moved, the idea of drying
herself was absurd. ‘Whatever have you done, darling?’ he
asked, with alarm, the tender epithet slipping out unawares.
‘Walked through the largest river in the county—that’s
what I’ve done! They locked me up for being out with you;
and it seemed so unjust that I couldn’t bear it, so I got out of
the window and escaped across the stream!’ She had begun
the explanation in her usual slightly independent tones, but
before she had finished the thin pink lips trembled, and she
could hardly refrain from crying.
‘Dear Sue!’ he said. ‘You must take off all your things! And
let me see—you must borrow some from the landlady. I’ll
ask her.’
‘No, no! Don’t let her know, for God’s sake! We are so
near the school that they’ll come after me!’
‘Then you must put on mine. You don’t mind?’
‘O no.’
‘My Sunday suit, you know. It is close here.’ In fact,
everything was close and handy in Jude’s single chamber,
because there was not room for it to be otherwise. He
opened a drawer, took out his best dark suit, and giving the
garments a shake, said, ‘Now, how long shall I give you?’
 ‘Ten minutes.’
Jude left the room and went into the street, where he
walked up and down. A clock struck half-past seven, and he
returned. Sitting in his only arm-chair he saw a slim and
fragile being masquerading as himself on a Sunday, so
pathetic in her defencelessness that his heart felt big with
the sense of it. On two other chairs before the fire were her
wet garments. She blushed as he sat down beside her, but
only for a moment.
‘I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this
and all my things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They
are only a woman’s clothes—sexless cloth and linen.… I
wish I didn’t feel so ill and sick! Will you dry my clothes
now? Please do, Jude, and I’ll get a lodging by and by. It is
not late yet.’
‘No, you shan’t, if you are ill. You must stay here. Dear,
dear Sue, what can I get for you?’
‘I don’t know! I can’t help shivering. I wish I could get
warm.’ Jude put on her his great-coat in addition, and then
ran out to the nearest public-house, whence he returned
with a little bottle in his hand. ‘Here’s six25 of best brandy,’
he said. ‘Now you drink it, dear; all of it.’
‘I can’t out of the bottle, can I?’ Jude fetched the glass
from the dressing-table, and administered the spirit in some
water. She gasped a little, but gulped it down, and lay back
in the arm-chair.
She then began to relate circumstantially her experiences
since they had parted; but in the middle of her story her
voice faltered, her head nodded, and she ceased. She was in
a sound sleep. Jude, dying of anxiety lest she should have
caught a chill which might permanently injure her, was glad
to hear the regular breathing. He softly went nearer to her,
and observed that a warm flush now rosed her hitherto blue
cheeks, and felt that her hanging hand was no longer cold.
Then he stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and
saw in her almost a divinity.
 III–4
Jude’s reverie was interrupted by the creak of footsteps
ascending the stairs.
He whisked Sue’s clothing from the chair where it was
drying, thrust it under the bed, and sat down to his book.
Somebody knocked and opened the door immediately. It
was the landlady.
‘O, I didn’t know whether you was in or not, Mr. Fawley. I
wanted to know if you would require supper. I see you’ve a
young gentleman—’
‘Yes, ma’am. But I think I won’t come down to-night. Will
you bring supper up on a tray, and I’ll have a cup of tea as
well.’
It was Jude’s custom to go downstairs to the kitchen, and
eat his meals with the family, to save trouble. His landlady
brought up the supper, however, on this occasion, and he
took it from her at the door.
When she had descended he set the teapot on the hob,
and drew out Sue’s clothes anew; but they were far from
dry. A thick woollen gown, he found, held a deal of water. So
he hung them up again, and enlarged his fire and mused as
the steam from the garments went up the chimney.
Suddenly she said, ‘Jude!’
‘Yes. All right. How do you feel now?’
‘Better. Quite well. Why, I fell asleep, didn’t I? What time
is it? Not late surely?’
‘It is past ten.’
‘Is it really? What shall I do!’ she said, starting up.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Yes; that’s what I want to do. But I don’t know what they
would say! And what will you do?’
‘I am going to sit here by the fire all night, and read. To-
morrow is Sunday, and I haven’t to go out anywhere.
Perhaps you will be saved a severe illness by resting there.
Don’t be frightened. I’m all right. Look here, what I have got
for you. Some supper.’
When she had sat upright she breathed plaintively and
said, ‘I do feel rather weak still. I thought I was well; and I
ought not to be here, ought I?’ But the supper fortified her
somewhat, and when she had had some tea and had lain
back again she was bright and cheerful.
The tea must have been green, or too long drawn, for she
seemed preternaturally wakeful afterwards, though Jude,
who had not taken any, began to feel heavy; till her
conversation fixed his attention.
‘You called me a creature of civilization, or something,
didn’t you?’ she said, breaking a silence. ‘It was very odd
you should have done that.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of
negation of it.’
‘You are very philosophical. “A negation” is profound
talking.’
‘Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?’ she asked, with a
touch of raillery.
‘No—not learned. Only you don’t talk quite like a girl—
well, a girl who has had no advantages.’
‘I have had advantages. I don’t know Latin and Greek,
though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know
most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations,
and other books too. I read Lemprière, Catullus, Martial,
Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron,
De Brantôme, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding,
Shakespeare,26 the Bible, and other such; and found that all
interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with
its mystery.’
‘You have read more than I,’ he said with a sigh. ‘How
came you to read some of those queerer ones?’
‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘it was by accident. My life
has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in
me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I
have mixed with them—one or two of them particularly—
almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about
them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their
guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—
no man short of a sensual savage—will molest a woman by
day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him.
Until she says by a look “Come on” he is always afraid to,
and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However,
what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed
a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster,
and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I
should never have got hold of otherwise.’
‘Is your friendship broken off?’
‘O yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he
had taken his degree and left Christminster.’
‘You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?’
‘Yes. We used to go about together—on walking tours,
reading tours, and things of that sort—like two men almost.
He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But
when I joined him in London I found he meant a different
thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress,
in fact, but I wasn’t in love with him—and on my saying I
should go away if he didn’t agree to my plan, he did so. We
shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a
leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was
taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his
heart by holding out against him so long at such close
quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might
play that game once too often, he said. He came home
merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for
my cruelty—though I hope he died of consumption and not
of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral,
and was his only mourner. He left me a little money—
because I broke his heart, I suppose. That’s how men are—
so much better than women!’
 ‘Good heavens!—what did you do then?’
‘Ah—now you are angry with me!’ she said, a contralto
note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. ‘I
wouldn’t have told you if I had known!’
‘No, I am not. Tell me all.’
‘Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble
scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some
time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father—
who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-
worker near Long-Acre—wouldn’t have me back; and I got
that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me.… I
said you didn’t know how bad I was!’
Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant,
as if to read more carefully the creature he had given
shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: ‘However you have
lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are
unconventional!’
‘I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I
have
“twitched the robe
From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,” ’27
said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear
that she was brimming with tears. ‘But I have never yielded
myself to any lover, if that’s what you mean! I have
remained as I began.’
‘I quite believe you. But some women would not have
remained as they began.’
‘Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must
be cold-natured,—sexless—on account of it. But I won’t have
it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been
the most self-contained in their daily lives.
‘Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this University-scholar-
friend?’
‘Yes—long ago. I have never made any secret of it to
anybody.’
 ‘What did he say?’
‘He did not pass any criticism—only said I was everything
to him, whatever I did; and things like that.’
Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and
further away from him with her strange ways and curious
unconsciousness of gender.
‘Aren’t you really vexed with me, dear Jude?’ she
suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness
that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who
had just told her story so lightly. ‘I would rather offend
anybody in the world than you, I think!’
‘I don’t know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care
very much about you!’
‘I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met.’
‘You don’t care more! There, I ought not to say that. Don’t
answer it!’
There was another long silence. He felt that she was
treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what
way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much
stronger than he.
‘I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have
worked so hard,’ he said, to turn the subject. ‘I am absorbed
in Theology, you know. And what do you think I should be
doing just about now, if you weren’t here? I should be saying
my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn’t like—’
‘O no, no,’ she answered, ‘I would rather not, if you don’t
mind. I should seem so—such a hypocrite.’
‘I thought you wouldn’t join, so I didn’t propose it. You
must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some
day.’
‘To be ordained, I think you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you haven’t given up the idea?—I thought that
perhaps you had by this time.’
‘Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do
about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster
Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson—’
‘I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a
qualified degree, on its intellectual side,’ said Sue Bridehead
earnestly. ‘My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was
the most irreligious man I ever knew and the most moral.
And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles.28
The mediævalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off,
or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times
one couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for the traditions
of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers
there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my
saddest, rightest mind I always felt,
“O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted
Gods!” ’ …29
‘Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!’
‘Then I won’t, dear Jude!’ The emotional throat-note had
come back, and she turned her face away.
‘I still think Christminster has much that is glorious;
though I was resentful because I couldn’t get there.’ He
spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to
tears.
‘It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople,
artizans, drunkards, and paupers,’ she said, perverse still at
his differing from her. ‘They see life as it is, of course; but
few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your
own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was
intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a
passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or
friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the
millionaires’ sons.’
‘Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for
something higher.’
‘And I for something broader, truer,’ she insisted. ‘At
present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and
religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two
rams butting each other.’
‘What would Mr. Phillotson—’
‘It is a place full of fetichists and ghost-seers!’
He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the
schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some
generalizations about the offending University. Jude was
extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson’s
protégée and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him.
‘Well, that’s just what I am, too,’ he said. ‘I am fearful of
life, spectre-seeing always.’
‘But you are good and dear!’ she murmured.
His heart bumped, and he made no reply.
‘You are in the Tractarian30 stage just now, are you not?’
she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a
common trick with her. ‘Let me see—when was I there?—In
the year eighteen hundred and—’
‘There’s a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to
me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I
read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will
you concentrate your attention on any book of these you
like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my
custom? You are sure you won’t join me?’
‘I’ll look at you.’
‘No. Don’t tease, Sue!’
‘Very well—I’ll do just as you bid me, and I won’t vex you,
Jude,’ she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be
good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly.
A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her,
and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the
leaves.
‘Jude,’ she said brightly, when he had finished and come
back to her; ‘will you let me make you a new New
Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?’
‘O yes. How was that made?’
 ‘I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and
Gospels into separate brochures,31 and re-arranging them in
chronological order as written, beginning the book with
Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting
the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume
rebound. My University friend Mr.______but never mind his
name, poor boy—said it was an excellent idea. I know that
reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before,
and twice as understandable.’
‘H’m!’ said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.
‘And what a literary enormity this is,’ she said, as she
glanced into the pages of Solomon’s Song. ‘I mean the
synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the
real nature of that rhapsody. You needn’t be alarmed:
nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed,
many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the
drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or
bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long
faces and writing down such stuff.’
Jude looked pained. ‘You are quite Voltairean!’32 he
murmured.
‘Indeed? Then I won’t say any more, except that people
have no right to falsify the Bible! I hate such humbug as
could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical
abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in
that great and passionate song!’ Her speech had grown
spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes
moist. ‘I wish I had a friend here to support me; but nobody
is ever on my side!’
‘But, my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against
you!’ he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her
introducing personal feeling into mere argument.
‘Yes you are, yes you are!’ she cried, turning away her
face that he might not see her brimming eyes. ‘You are on
the side of the people in the Training School—at least you
seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such
verses as this: “Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest
among women?”33 by the note: “The Church professeth her
faith” is supremely ridiculous!’
‘Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of
everything! I am—only too inclined just now to apply the
words profanely. You know you are fairest among women to
me, come to that!’
‘But you are not to say it now!’ Sue replied, her voice
changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met,
and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw
the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject,
and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an
old book like the Bible.
‘I won’t disturb your convictions—I really won’t!’ she went
on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she.
‘But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims;
and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my
comrade, I—shall I confess it?—thought that man might be
you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don’t
know what to say.’
‘Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust.
Life isn’t long enough to work out everything in Euclid34
problems before you believe it. I take Christianity.’
‘Well, perhaps you might take something worse.’
‘Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!’ He thought of
Arabella.
‘I won’t ask what, because we are going to be very nice
with each other, aren’t we, and never, never, vex each other
any more?’ She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed
trying to nestle in his breast.
‘I shall always care for you!’ said Jude.
‘And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and
forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!’
He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was
too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the
poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? … But
Sue was so dear! … If he could only get over the sense of
her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his,
what a comrade she would make; for their difference of
opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer
together on matters of daily human experience. She was
nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and
he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence,
would ever divide him from her.
But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till
she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise.
Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and
made up the fire anew. About six o’clock he awoke
completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes
were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than
his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a
new bun and boyish as a Ganymedes.35 Placing the
garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went
downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard.

III–5
When he returned she was dressed as usual.
‘Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?’ she
asked. ‘The town is not yet astir.’
‘But you have had no breakfast.’
‘O, I don’t want any! I fear I ought not to have run away
from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light
of morning, don’t they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don’t
know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the
only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I
hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me dreadfully, I
expect!’
‘I’ll go to him and explain—’ began Jude.
‘O no, you shan’t. I don’t care for him! He may think what
he likes—I shall do just as I choose!’
 ‘But you just this moment said—’
‘Well, if I did; I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought
of what I shall do—go to the sister of one of my fellow-
students in the Training School, who has asked me to visit
her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles
from here—and I shall stay there till this has blown over,
and I get back to the Training School again.’
At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her
a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room
for use on rising to go to his work every day before the
household was astir.
‘Now a dew-bit36 to eat with it,’ he said; ‘and off we go.
You can have a regular breakfast when you get there.’
They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying
her to the station. As they departed along the street a head
was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly
withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to
wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she
would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the
Training School. They stood rather miserably together on the
platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more.
‘I want to tell you something—two things,’ he said
hurriedly as the train came up. ‘One is a warm one, the
other a cold one!’
‘Jude,’ she said. ‘I know one of them. And you mustn’t!’
‘What?’
‘You mustn’t love me. You are too like me—that’s all!’
Jude’s face became so full of complicated glooms that
hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu
through the carriage window. And then the train moved on,
and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away.

Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday

of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go
once to the Cathedral services. The next morning there
came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude,
she had written directly she had reached her friend’s house.
She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters,
and then added:—
‘What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I
said to you at 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 thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and
won’t make her miserable by saying you don’t—
Ever, Sue.’
It would be superfluous 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 unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have
been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a
conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of
her.
Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to
Sue’s impulsive 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 her he sent off 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 morning 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!’
‘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?’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly, her face changing a little. ‘Though I
didn’t ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has
been! But I shouldn’t care if he didn’t come any more!’
It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be
piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude’s
feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to
something else.
‘This will blow over, dear Sue,’ he said. ‘The Training
School authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a
student in some other, no doubt.’
‘I’ll ask Mr. Phillotson,” she said decisively.
Sue’s kind hostess now returned from church, and there
was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the
afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat
with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content
him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation
it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest,
should learn.
But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed
with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not
to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun
to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there
came promptly a note, which she must have written almost
immediately he had gone from her:
‘Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid
to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my
horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude,
please still keep me as your friend and associate, with
all my faults. I’ll try not to be like it again.
‘I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my
things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for
half-an-hour, if you would like?—Your repentant SUE.’
Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for
him at the Cathedral works when she came.

III–6
Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of
great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He
was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the
mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to
undertake a large boys’ school in his native town of Shaston,
which stood on a hill sixty miles to the southwest as the
crow flies.
A glance at the place and its accessories was almost
enough to reveal that the schoolmaster’s plans and dreams
so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new
dream with which neither the Church nor literature had
much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was
now bent on making and saving money for a practical
purpose—that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might
conduct one of the girls’ schools adjoining his own; for which
purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she
would not marry him off-hand.
About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to
Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place
with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new
schoolhouse at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the
books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in
his parlour during the dark winter nights and reattempt
some of his old studies—one branch of which had included
Roman-Britannic antiquities—an unremunerative labour for
a National schoolmaster37 but a subject, that, after his
abandonment of the University scheme, had interested him
as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to
those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where
these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel
inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the
civilization of that time.
A resumption of this investigation was the outward and
apparent hobby of Phillotson at present—his ostensible
reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes,
and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house
with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead
of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part
had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with
him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all.
Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had
grown quite late—to near midnight, indeed—and the light of
his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the
hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward,
announced as by words a place and person given over to
study, he was not exactly studying.
The interior of the room—the books, the furniture, the
schoolmaster’s loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the
flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of
undistracted research—more than creditable to a man who
had had no advantages beyond those of his own making.
And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now.
What he was regarding was not history. They were historic
notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some
months before, and it was the clerical rendering of word
after word that absorbed him.
 He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of
letters, few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays.
Each was in its envelope just as it had arrived, and the
handwriting was of the same womanly character as the
historic notes. He unfolded them one by one and read them
musingly. At first sight there seemed in these small
documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They
were straightforward, frank letters, signed ‘Sue B—’; just
such ones as would be written during short absences, with
no other thought than their speedy destruction, and chiefly
concerning books in reading and other experiences of a
Training School, forgotten doubtless by the writer with the
passing of the day of their inditing. In one of them—quite a
recent note—the young woman said that she had received
his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and
generous of him to say he would not come to see her
oftener than she desired (the school being such an awkward
place for callers, and because of her strong wish that her
engagment to him should not be known, which it would
infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the
schoolmaster pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was
to be gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man who
loved her had not been often to see her? The problem
occupied him, distracted him.
He opened another drawer, and found therein an
envelope, from which he drew a photograph of Sue as a
child, long before he had known her, standing under trellis-
work with a little basket in her hand. There was another of
her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a
very distinct and attractive picture of her, which just
disclosed, too, the thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter
moods. It was a duplicate of the one she had given Jude,
and would have given to any man. Phillotson brought it half-
way to his lips, but withdrew it in doubt at her perplexing
phrases: ultimately kissing the dead pasteboard with all the
passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young
man of eighteen.
The schoolmaster’s was an unhealthy-looking, old-
fashioned face, rendered more old-fashioned by his style of
shaving. A certain gentlemanliness had been imparted to it
by nature, suggesting an inherent wish to do rightly by all.
His speech was a little slow, but his tones were sincere
enough to make his hesitation no defect. His greying hair
was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle of his
crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he
only wore spectacles when reading at night. It was almost
certainly a renunciation forced upon him by his academic
purpose, rather than a distaste for women, which had
hitherto kept him from closing with one of the sex in
matrimony.
Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were
repeated many and oft times when he was not under the
eye of the boys, whose quick and penetrating regard would
frequently become almost intolerable to the self-conscious
master in his present anxious care for Sue, making him, in
the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet
glances, lest they should read what the dream within him
was.
He had honourably acquiesced in Sue’s announced wish
that he was not often to visit her at the Training School; but
at length, his patience being sorely tried, he set out one
Saturday afternoon to pay her an unexpected call. There the
news of her departure—expulsion as it might almost have
been considered—was flashed upon him without warning or
mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few
minutes to behold her face; and when he turned away he
could hardly see the road before him.
Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the
subject, although it was fourteen days old. A short reflection
told him that this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being
as ample a reason for silence as any degree of
blameworthiness.
They had informed him at the school where she was
living, and having no immediate anxiety about her comfort
his thoughts took the direction of a burning indignation
against the Training School Committee. In his bewilderment
Phillotson entered the adjacent cathedral, just now in a
direly dismantled state by reason of the repairs. He sat
down on a block of freestone, regardless of the dusty
imprint it made on his breeches; and his listless eyes
following the movements of the workmen he presently
became aware that the reputed culprit, Sue’s lover Jude,
was one amongst them.
Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the
meeting by the model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently
witnessed Phillotson’s tentative courtship of Sue in the lane
there had grown up in the young man’s mind a curious
dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to communicate in
any way with him; and since Phillotson’s success in
obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude,
he had frankly recognized that he did not wish to see or
hear of his senior any more, learn anything of his pursuits,
or even imagine again what excellencies might appertain to
his character. On this very day of the schoolmaster’s visit
Jude was expecting Sue, as she had promised; and when
therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the nave of the
building, saw, moreover, that he was coming to speak to
him, he felt no little embarrassment; which Phillotson’s own
embarrassment prevented his observing.
Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other
workmen to the spot where Phillotson had been sitting. Jude
offered him a piece of sackcloth for a cushion, and told him
it was dangerous to sit on the bare block.
‘Yes; yes,’ said Phillotson abstractedly, as he reseated
himself, his eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying
to remember where he was. ‘I won’t keep you long. It was
merely that I have heard that you have seen my little friend
Sue recently. It occurred to me to speak to you on that
account. I merely want to ask—about her.’
‘I think I know what!’ Jude hurriedly said. ‘About her
escaping from the Training School, and her coming to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well’—Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and
fiendish wish to annihilate his rival at all cost. By the
exercise of that treachery which love for the same woman
renders possible to men the most honourable in every other
relation of life, he could send off Phillotson in agony and
defeat by saying that the scandal was true, and that Sue
had irretrievably committed herself with him. But his action
did not respond for a moment to his animal instinct; and
what he said was, ‘I am glad of your kindness in coming to
talk plainly to me about it. You know what they say?—that I
ought to marry her.’
‘What!’
‘And I wish with all my soul I could!’
Phillotson trembled, and his naturally pale face acquired a
corpselike sharpness in its lines. ‘I had no idea that it was of
this nature! God forbid!’
‘No, no!’ said Jude aghast. ‘I thought you understood? I
mean that were I in a position to marry her, or some one,
and settle down, instead of living in lodgings here and there,
I should be glad!’
What he had really meant was simply that he loved her.
‘But—since this painful matter has been opened up—what
really happened?’ asked Phillotson, with the firmness of a
man who felt that a sharp smart now was better than a long
agony of suspense hereafter. ‘Cases arise, and this is one,
when even ungenerous questions must be put to make false
assumptions impossible, and to kill scandal.’
Jude explained readily; giving the whole series of
adventures, including the night at the shepherd’s, her wet
arrival at his lodging, her indisposition from her immersion,
their vigil of discussion, and his seeing her off next morning.
‘Well now,’ said Phillotson at the conclusion, ‘I take it as
your final word, and I know I can believe you, that the
suspicion which led to her rustication is an absolutely
baseless one?’
‘It is,’ said Jude solemnly. ‘Absolutely. So help me God!’
The schoolmaster rose. Each of the twain felt that the
interview could not comfortably merge in a friendly
discussion of their recent experiences, after the manner of
friends; and when Jude had taken him round, and shown him
some features of the renovation which the old cathedral was
undergoing, Phillotson bade the young man good-day and
went away.
This visit took place about eleven o’clock in the morning;
but no Sue appeared. When Jude went to his dinner at one
he saw his beloved ahead of him in the street leading up
from the North Gate, walking as if in no way looking for him.
Speedily overtaking her he remarked that he had asked her
to come to him at the Cathedral, and she had promised.
‘I have been to get my things from the College,’ she said
—an observation which he was expected to take as an
answer, though it was not one. Finding her to be in this
evasive mood he felt inclined to give her the information so
long withheld.
‘You have not seen Mr. Phillotson to-day?’ he ventured to
inquire.
‘I have not. But I am not going to be cross-examined
about him; and if you ask anything more I won’t answer!’
‘It is very odd that—’ He stopped, regarding her.
‘What?’
‘That you are often not so nice in your real presence as
you are in your letters!’
‘Does it really seem so to you?’ said she, smiling with
quick curiosity. ‘Well, that’s strange; but I feel just the same
about you, Jude. When you are gone away I seem such a
cold-hearted—’
As she knew his sentiment towards her Jude saw that they
were getting upon dangerous ground. It was now, he
thought, that he must speak as an honest man.
But he did not speak, and she continued: ‘It was that
which made me write and say—I didn’t mind you loving me,
—if you wanted to, much!’
The exultation he might have felt at what that implied, or
seemed to imply, was nullified by his intention, and he
rested rigid till he began: ‘I have never told you—’
‘Yes you have,’ murmured she.
‘I mean, I have never told you my history—all of it.’
‘But I guess it. I know nearly.’
Jude looked up. Could she possibly know of that morning
performance of his with Arabella; which in a few months had
ceased to be a marriage more completely than by death? He
saw that she did not.
‘I can’t quite tell you herein the street,’ he went on with a
gloomy tongue. ‘And you had better not come to my
lodgings. Let us go in here.’
The building by which they stood was the market-house;
it was the only place available; and they entered, the
market being over, and the stalls and areas empty. He would
have preferred a more congenial spot, but, as usually
happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his
tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor
littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual
squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable
refuse. He began and finished his brief narrative, which
merely led up to the information that he had married a wife
some years earlier, and that his wife was living still. Almost
before her countenance had time to change she hurried out
the words,
‘Why didn’t you tell me before!’
‘I couldn’t. It seemed so cruel to tell it.’
 ‘To yourself, Jude. So it was better to be cruel to me!’
‘No, dear darling!’ cried Jude passionately. He tried to take
her hand, but she withdrew it. Their old relations of
confidence seemed suddenly to have ended, and the
antagonisms of sex to sex were left without any
counterpoising predilections. She was his comrade, friend,
unconscious sweetheart no longer; and her eyes regarded
him in estranged silence.
‘I was ashamed of the episode in my life which brought
about the marriage,’ he continued. ‘I can’t explain it
precisely now. I could have done it if you had taken it
differently!’
‘But how can I?’ she burst out. ‘Here I have been saying,
or writing, that—that you might love me, or something of
the sort!—just out of charity—and all the time—O it is
perfectly damnable how things are!’ she said, stamping her
foot in a nervous quiver.
‘You take me wrong, Sue! I never thought you cared for
me at all, till quite lately; so I felt it did not matter! Do you
care for me, Sue?—you know how I mean?—I don’t like “out
of charity” at all!’
It was a question which in the circumstances Sue did not
choose to answer.
‘I suppose she—your wife—is—a very pretty woman, even
if she’s wicked?’ she asked quickly.
‘She’s pretty enough, as far as that goes.’
‘Prettier than I am, no doubt!’
‘You are not the least alike. And I have never seen her for
years.… But she’s sure to come back—they always do!’
‘How strange of you to stay apart from her like this!’ said
Sue, her trembling lip and lumpy throat belying her irony.
‘You, such a religious man. How will the demi-gods in your
Pantheon38—I mean those legendary persons you call Saints
—intercede for you after this? Now if I had done such a thing
it would have been different, and not remarkable, for I at
least don’t regard marriage as a Sacrament. Your theories
are not so advanced as your practice!’
‘Sue, you are terribly cutting when you like to be—a
perfect Voltaire! But you must treat me as you will!’
When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and
trying to blink away her sympathetic tears said with all the
winning reproachfulness of a heart-hurt woman: ‘Ah—you
should have told me before you gave me that idea that you
wanted to be allowed to love me! I had no feeling before
that moment at the railway-station, except—’ For once Sue
was as miserable as he, in her attempts to keep herself free
from emotion, and her less than half-success.
‘Don’t cry, dear!’ he implored.
‘I am—not crying—because I meant to—love you; but
because of your want of—confidence!’
They were quite screened from the Market-square
without, and he could not help putting out his arm towards
her waist. His momentary desire was the means of her
rallying. ‘No, no!’ she said, drawing back stringently, and
wiping her eyes. ‘Of course not! It would be hypocrisy to
pretend that it would be meant as from my cousin; and it
can’t be in any other way.’
They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself
recovered. It was distracting to Jude, and his heart would
have ached less had she appeared anyhow but as she did
appear; essentially large-minded and generous on
reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow
womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give
her sex.
‘I don’t blame you for what you couldn’t help,’ she said
smiling. ‘How should I be so foolish! I do blame you a little
bit for not telling me before. But after all it doesn’t matter.
We should have had to keep apart, you see, even if this had
not been in your life.’
‘No, we shouldn’t, Sue! This is the only obstacle!’
 ‘You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be
your wife, even if there had been no obstacle,’ said Sue,
with a gentle seriousness which did not reveal her mind.
‘And then we are cousins, and it is bad for cousins to marry.
And—I am engaged to somebody else. As to our going on
together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the
people round us would have made it unable to continue.
Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited,
as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their
philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire.
The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at
least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them—the part of
—who is it?—Venus Urania.’39
Her being able to talk learnedly showed that she was
mistress of herself again; and before they parted she had
almost regained her vivacious glance, her reciprocity of
tone, her gay manner, and her second-thought attitude of
critical largeness towards others of her age and sex.
He could speak more freely now. ‘There were several
reasons against my telling you rashly. One was what I have
said; another, that it was always impressed upon me that I
ought not to marry—that I belonged to an odd and peculiar
family—the wrong breed for marriage.’
‘Ah—who used to say that to you?’
‘My great-aunt. She said it always ended badly with us
Fawleys.’
‘That’s strange. My father used to say the same to me!’
They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough,
even as an assumption: that a union between them, had
such been possible, would have meant a terrible
intensification of unfitness—two bitters in one dish.
‘O but there can’t be anything in it!’ she said with nervous
lightness. ‘Our family have been unlucky of late years in
choosing mates—that’s all.’
And then they pretended to persuade themselves that all
that had happened was of no consequence, and that they
could still be cousins and friends and warm correspondents,
and have happy genial times when they met, even if they
met less frequently than before. Their parting was in good
friendship, and yet Jude’s last look into her eyes was tinged
with inquiry, for he felt that he did not even now quite know
her mind.

III–7
Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed across Jude like a
withering blast.
Before reading the letter he was led to suspect that its
contents were of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight
of the signature—which was in her full name, never used in
her correspondence with him since her first note:
‘My dear Jude,—I have something to tell you which
perhaps you will not be surprised to hear, though
certainly it may strike you as being accelerated (as the
railway companies say of their trains). Mr. Phillotson
and I are to be married quite soon—in three or four
weeks. We had intended, as you know, to wait till I had
gone through my course of training and obtained my
certificate, so as to assist him, if necessary, in the
teaching. But he generously says he does not see any
object in waiting, now I am not at the Training School. It
is so good of him, because the awkwardness of my
situation has really come about by my fault in getting
expelled.
‘Wish me joy. Remember I say you are to, and you
mustn’t refuse!—Your affectionate cousin,
‘Susanna Florence Mary Bridehead.’40
Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast;
and kept on drinking tea because his mouth was so dry.
Then presently he went back to his work and laughed the
usual bitter laugh of a man so confronted. Everything
seemed turning to satire. And yet, what could the poor girl
do? he asked himself: and felt worse than shedding tears.
‘O Susanna Florence Mary!’ he said as he worked. ‘You
don’t know what marriage means!’
Could it be possible that his announcement of his own
marriage had pricked her on to this, just as his visit to her
when in liquor may have pricked her on to her engagement?
To be sure, there seemed to exist these other and sufficient
reasons, practical and social, for her decision; but Sue was
not a very practical or calculating person; and he was
compelled to think that a pique at having his secret sprung
upon her had moved her to give way to Phillotson’s
probable representations, that the best course to prove how
unfounded were the suspicions of the school authorities
would be to marry him off-hand,41 as in fulfilment of an
ordinary engagement. She had, in fact, been placed in an
awkward corner. Poor Sue!
He determined to play the Spartan;42 to make the best of
it, and support her; but he could not write the requested
good wishes for a day or two. Meanwhile there came
another note from his impatient little dear:
‘Jude, will you give me away? I have nobody else who
could do it so conveniently as you, being the only
married relation I have here on the spot, even if my
father were friendly enough to be willing, which he
isn’t. I hope you won’t think it a trouble? I have been
looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and
it seems to be very humiliating that a giver-away
should be required at all. According to the ceremony as
there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own
will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody
gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any
other domestic animal. Bless your exalted views of
woman, O Churchman! But I forget: I am no longer
privileged to tease you.—Ever,
 ‘Susanna Florence Mary Bridehead.’
Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:
‘My dear Sue,—Of course I wish you joy! And also of
course I will give you away. What I suggest is that, as
you have no house of your own, you do not marry from
your school friend’s, but from mine. It would be more
proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person
nearest related to you in this part of the world.
‘I don’t see why you sign your letter in such a new
and terribly formal way? Surely you care a bit about me
still!—Ever your affectionate, Jude.’
What had jarred on him even more than the signature
was a little sting he had been silent on—the phrase ‘married
relation’—What an idiot it made him seem as her lover! If
Sue had written that in satire, he could hardly forgive her; if
in suffering—ah, that was another thing!
His offer of his lodging must have commended itself to
Phillotson at any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line
of warm thanks, accepting the convenience. She also
thanked him. Jude immediately moved into more
commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage of
the suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue’s
unpleasant experience as for the sake of room.
Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for the wedding;
and Jude decided, after inquiry, that she should come into
residence on the following Saturday, which would allow of a
ten days’ stay in the city prior to the ceremony, sufficiently
representing a nominal residence of fifteen.
She arrived by the ten o’clock train on the day aforesaid,
Jude not going to meet her at the station, by her special
request, that he should not lose a morning’s work and pay,
she said (if this were her true reason). But so well by this
time did he know Sue that the remembrance of their mutual
sensitiveness at emotional crises might, he thought, have
weighed with her in this. When he came home to dinner she
had taken possession of her apartment.
She lived in the same house with him, but on a different
floor, and they saw each other little, an occasional supper
being the only meal they took together, when Sue’s manner
was something that of a scared child. What she felt he did
not know; their conversation was mechanical, though she
did not look pale or ill. Phillotson came frequently, but
mostly when Jude was absent. On the morning of the
wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and
her cousin had breakfast together for the first and last time
during this curious interval; in his room—the parlour—which
he had hired for the period of Sue’s residence. Seeing, as
women do, how helpless he was in making the place
comfortable, she bustled about.
‘What’s the matter, Jude?’ she said suddenly.
He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin
on his hands, looking into a futurity which seemed to be
sketched out on the tablecloth.
‘O—nothing!’
‘You are “father,” you know. That’s what they call the man
who gives you away.’
Jude could have said ‘Phillotson’s age entitles him to be
called that!’ But he would not annoy her by such a cheap
retort.
She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in
reflection, and before the meal was over both he and she
wished they had not put such confidence in their new view
of things, and had taken breakfast apart. What oppressed
Jude was the thought that, having done a wrong thing of this
sort himself, he was aiding and abetting the woman he
loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of imploring and
warning her against it. It was on his tongue to say, ‘You have
quite made up your mind?’
After breakfast they went out on an errand together
moved by a mutual thought that it was the last opportunity
they would have of indulging in unceremonious
companionship. By the irony of fate, and the curious trick in
Sue’s nature of tempting Providence at critical times, she
took his arm as they walked through the muddy street—a
thing she had never done before in her life—and on turning
the corner they found themselves close to a grey
Perpendicular43 church with a low-pitched roof—the church
of St. Thomas.
‘That’s the church,’ said Jude.
‘Where I am going to be married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Indeed!’ she exclaimed with curiosity. ‘How I should like
to go in and see what the spot is like where I am so soon to
kneel and do it.’
Again he said to himself, ‘She does not realize what
marriage means!’
He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they
entered by the western door. The only person inside the
gloomy building was a charwoman44 cleaning. Sue still held
Jude’s arm, almost as if she loved him. Cruelly sweet,
indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his thoughts
of a penance in store for her were tempered by an ache:
‘… I can find no way
How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,
Nor prove too much for your womanhood!’45
They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the
altar railing, which they stood against in silence, turning
then and walking down the nave again, her hand still on his
arm, precisely like a couple just married. The too suggestive
incident, entirely of her making, nearly broke down Jude.
‘I like to do things like this,’ she said in the delicate voice
of an epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she
spoke the truth.
‘I know you do!’ said Jude.
 ‘They are interesting, because they have probably never
been done before. I shall walk down the church like this with
my husband in about two hours, shan’t I!’
‘No doubt you will!’
‘Was it like this when you were married?’
‘Good God, Sue—don’t be so awfully merciless! … There,
dear one, I didn’t mean it!’
‘Ah—you are vexed!’ she said regretfully, as she blinked
away an access of eye moisture. ‘And I promised never to
vex you! … I suppose I ought not to have asked you to bring
me in here. O I oughtn’t! I see it now. My curiosity to hunt up
a new sensation always leads me into these scrapes.
Forgive me! … You will, won’t you, Jude?’
The appeal was so remorseful that Jude’s eyes were even
wetter than hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.
‘Now we’ll hurry away, and I won’t do it any more!’ she
continued humbly; and they came out of the building, Sue
intending to go on to the station to meet Phillotson. But the
first person they encountered on entering the main street
was the schoolmaster himself, whose train had arrived
sooner than Sue expected. There was nothing really to
demur to in her leaning on Jude’s arm; but she withdrew her
hand; and Jude thought that Phillotson had looked surprised.
‘We have been doing such a funny thing!’ said she,
smiling candidly. ‘We’ve been to the church, rehearsing as it
were. Haven’t we, Jude?’
‘How? said Phillotson curiously.
Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be
unnecessary frankness; but she had gone too far not to
explain all, which she accordingly did, telling him how they
had marched up to the altar.
Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude said as
cheerfully as he could, ‘I am going to buy her another little
present. Will you both come to the shop with me?’
‘No,’ said Sue, ‘I’ll go on to the house with him;’ and
requesting her lover not to be a long time she departed with
the schoolmaster.
Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they
prepared for the ceremony. Phillotson’s hair was brushed to
a painful extent, and his shirt collar appeared stiffer than it
had been for the previous twenty years. Beyond this he
looked dignified and thoughtful, and altogether a man of
whom it was not unsafe to predict that he would make a
kind and considerate husband. That he adored Sue was
obvious; and she could almost be seen to feel that she was
undeserving his adoration.
Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly46
from the Red Lion, and six or seven women and children had
gathered by the door when they came out. The
schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though Jude was
getting to be recognized as a citizen; and the couple were
judged to be some relations of his from a distance, nobody
supposing Sue to have been a recent pupil at the Training
School.
In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little
wedding-present, which turned out to be two or three yards
of white tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as a
veil.
‘It looks so odd over a bonnet,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the
bonnet off.’
‘O no—let it stay,’ said Phillotson. And she obeyed.
When they had passed up the church and were standing
in their places Jude found that the antecedent visit had
certainly taken off the edge of this performance, but by the
time they were half way on with the service he wished from
his heart that he had not undertaken the business of giving
her away. How could Sue have had the temerity to ask him
to do it—a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him?
Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that
they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more
callous, and less romantic; or were they more heroic? Or
was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully gave herself
and him pain for the odd and mournful luxury of practising
long-suffering in her own person, and of being touched with
tender pity for him at having made him practise it? He could
perceive that her face was nervously set, and when they
reached the trying ordeal of Jude giving her to Phillotson she
could hardly command herself; rather, however, as it
seemed, from her knowledge of what her cousin must feel,
whom she need not have had there at all, than from self-
consideration. Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains
again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and
again, in all her colossal inconsistency.
Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded by a
mist which prevented his seeing the emotions of others. As
soon as they had signed their names and come away, and
the suspense was over, Jude felt relieved.
The meal at his lodging was a very simple affair, and at
two o’clock they went off. In crossing the pavement to the
fly she looked back; and there was a frightened light in her
eyes. Could it be that Sue had acted with such unusual
foolishness as to plunge into she knew not what for the sake
of asserting her independence of him, of retaliating on him
for his secrecy? Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with
men because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their
natures which wore out women’s hearts and lives.
When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round,
saying that she had forgotten something. Jude and the
landlady offered to get it.
‘No,’ she said, running back. ‘It is my handkerchief. I know
where I left it.’
Jude followed her back. She had found it, and came
holding it in her hand. She looked into his eyes with her own
tearful ones, and her lips suddenly parted as if she were
going to avow something. But she went on; and whatever
she had meant to say remained unspoken.

III–8
Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief
behind; or whether it were that she had miserably wished to
tell him of a love that at the last moment she could not
bring herself to express.
He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were
gone, and fearing that he might be tempted to drown his
misery in alcohol he went upstairs, changed his dark clothes
for his white, his thin boots for his thick, and proceeded to
his customary work for the afternoon.
But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind
him, and to be possessed with an idea that she would come
back. She could not possibly go home with Phillotson, he
fancied. The feeling grew and stirred. The moment that the
clock struck the last of his working hours he threw down his
tools and rushed homeward. ‘Has anybody been for me?’ he
asked.
Nobody had been there.
As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve
o’clock that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when
the clock had struck eleven, and the family had retired, he
could not shake off the feeling that she would come back
and sleep in the little room adjoining his own, in which she
had slept so many previous days. Her actions were always
unpredictable: why should she not come? Gladly would he
have compounded for the denial of her as a sweetheart and
wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend,
even on the most distant terms. His supper still remained
spread; and going to the front door, and softly setting it
open, he returned to the room and sat as watchers sit on
Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the phantom of the
Beloved. But she did not come.
Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and
looked out of the window, and pictured her through the
evening journey to London, whither she and Phillotson had
gone for their holiday; their rattling along through the damp
night to their hotel, under the same sky of ribbed cloud as
that he beheld, through which the moon showed its position
rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars
made themselves visible as faint nebulæ only. It was a new
beginning of Sue’s history. He projected his mind into the
future, and saw her with children more or less in her own
likeness around her. But the consolation of regarding them
as a continuation of her identity was denied to him, as to all
such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in not allowing
issue from one parent alone. Every desired renewal of an
existence is debased by being half alloy. ‘If at the
estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see
her child—hers solely—there would be comfort in it!’ said
Jude. And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly
seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for
man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his
aspirations.
The oppressive strength of his affection for Sue showed
itself on the morrow and following days yet more clearly. He
could no longer endure the light of the Melchester lamps;
the sunshine was as drab paint; and the blue sky as zinc.
Then he received news that his old aunt was dangerously ill
at Marygreen, which intelligence almost coincided with a
letter from his former employer at Christminster, who
offered him permanent work of a good class if he would
come back. The letters were almost a relief to him. He
started to visit Aunt Drusilla, and resolved to go onward to
Christminster to see what worth there might be in the
builder’s offer.
Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication
from the Widow Edlin had led him to expect. There was
every possibility of her lingering on for weeks or months,
though little likelihood. He wrote to Sue informing her of the
state of her aunt, and suggesting that she might like to see
her aged relative alive. He would meet her at Alfredston
Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back from
Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which
crossed his down-train47 at that station. Next morning,
accordingly, he went on to Christminster, intending to return
to Alfredston soon enough to keep the suggested
appointment with Sue.
The City of learning wore an estranged look, and he had
lost all feeling for its associations. Yet as the sun made vivid
lights and shades of the mullioned architecture of the
façades, and drew patterns of the crinkled battlements on
the young turf of the quadrangles, Jude thought he had
never seen the place look more beautiful. He came to the
street in which he had first beheld Sue. The chair she had
occupied when, leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a
hog-hair brush in her hand, her girlish figure had arrested
the gaze of his inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its former
spot, empty. It was as if she were dead, and nobody had
been found capable of succeeding her in that artistic
pursuit. Hers was now the City phantom, while those of the
intellectual and devotional worthies who had once moved
him to emotion were no longer able to assert their presence
there.
However, here he was; and in fulfilment of his intention
he went on to his former lodging in ‘Beersheba,’ near the
ritualistic church of St. Silas. The old landlady who opened
the door seemed glad to see him again, and bringing some
lunch informed him that the builder who had employed him
had called to inquire his address.
Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked. But
the old sheds and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it
impossible to engage himself to return and stay in this place
of vanished dreams. He longed for the hour of the
homeward train to Alfredston, where he might probably
meet Sue.
Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by
these scenes, there returned upon him that feeling which
had been his undoing more than once—that he was not
worth the trouble of being taken care of either by himself or
others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker Taylor, the
bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at Fourways, who
proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink
together. They walked along the street till they stood before
one of the great palpitating centres of Christminster life, the
inn wherein he formerly had responded to the challenge to
rehearse the Creed in Latin—now a popular tavern with a
spacious and inviting entrance, which gave admittance to a
bar that had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern
style since Jude’s residence here.
Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it
was too stylish a place now for him to feel at home in,
unless he was drunker than he had money to be just then.
Jude was longer finishing his, and stood abstractedly silent
in the, for the minute, almost empty place. The bar had
been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany
fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones,
while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed
sofa-benches. The room was divided into compartments in
the approved manner, between which were screens of
ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in one
compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of
those in the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids
leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of
little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter trough.
Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train
left, Jude sat down on one of the sofas. At the back of the
barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves
running along their front, on which stood precious liquids
that Jude did not know the name of, in bottles of topaz,
sapphire, ruby and amethyst. The moment was enlivened by
the entrance of some customers into the next compartment,
and the starting of the mechanical tell-tale of monies
received, which emitted a ting-ting every time a coin was
put in.
 The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible
to Jude’s direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the
glass behind her was occasionally caught by his eyes. He
had only observed this listlessly, when she turned her face
for a moment to the glass to set her hair tidy. Then he was
amazed to discover that the face was Arabella’s.
If she had come on to his compartment she would have
seen him. But she did not, this being presided over by the
maiden on the other side. Abby was in a black gown, with
white linen cuffs and a broad white collar, and her figure,
more developed than formerly, was accentuated by a bunch
of daffodils that she wore on her left bosom. In the
compartment she served stood an electro-plated fountain of
water over a spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent a steam
from the top, all this being visible to him only in the mirror
behind her; which also reflected the faces of the men she
was attending to—one of them a handsome, dissipated
young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who had been
relating to her an experience of some humorous sort.
‘O, Mr. Cockman, now! How can you tell such a tale to me
in my innocence!’ she cried gaily. ‘Mr. Cockman, what do
you use to make your moustache curl so beautiful?’ As the
young man was clean shaven the retort provoked a laugh at
his expense.
‘Come!’ said he, ‘I’ll have a Curaçao;48 and a light,
please.’
She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles, and
striking a match held it to his cigarette with ministering
archness while he whiffed.
‘Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my
dear?’ he asked.
‘Not a sound,’ said she.
‘Where is he?’
‘I left him in Australia; and I suppose he’s there still.’
Jude’s eyes grew rounder.
‘What made you part from him?’
 ‘Don’t you ask questions, and you won’t hear lies.’
‘Come then, give me my change, which you’ve been
keeping from me for the last quarter of an hour; and I’ll
romantically vanish up the street of this picturesque city.’
She handed the change over the counter, in taking which
he caught her fingers and held them. There was a slight
struggle and titter, and he bade her good-bye and left.
Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed philosopher. It
was extraordinary how far removed from his life Arabella
now seemed to be. He could not realize their nominal
closeness. And, this being the case, in his present frame of
mind he was indifferent to the fact that Arabella was his wife
indeed.
The compartment that she served emptied itself of
visitors, and after a brief thought he entered it, and went
forward to the counter. Arabella did not recognize him for a
moment. Then their glances met. She started; till a
humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she spoke.
‘Well, I’m blest! I thought you were underground years
ago!’
‘Oh!’
‘I never heard anything of you, or I don’t know that I
should have come here. But never mind! What shall I treat
you to this afternoon? A Scotch and soda? Come, anything
that the house will afford, for old acquaintance’ sake!’
‘Thanks, Arabella,’ said Jude without a smile. ‘But I don’t
want anything more than I’ve had.’ The fact was that her
unexpected presence there had destroyed at a stroke his
momentary taste for strong liquor as completely as if it had
whisked him back to his milk-fed infancy.
‘That’s a pity, now you could get it for nothing.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About six weeks. I returned from Sydney three months
ago. I always liked this business, you know.’
‘I wonder you came to this place!’
 ‘Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and
being in London I saw the situation in an advertisement.
Nobody was likely to know me here, even if I had minded,
for I was never in Christminster in my growing up.’
‘Why did you return from Australia?’
‘Oh, I had my reasons.… Then you are not a Don yet?’
‘No.’
‘Not even a Reverend?’
‘No.’
‘Nor so much as a Rather Reverend dissenting
gentleman?’49
‘I am as I was.’
‘True—you look so.’ She idly allowed her fingers to rest on
the pull of the beer-engine as she inspected him critically.
He observed that her hands were smaller and whiter than
when he had lived with her, and that on the hand which
pulled the engine she wore an ornamental ring set with
what seemed to be real sapphires—which they were,
indeed, and were much admired as such by the young men
who frequented the bar.
‘So you pass as having a living husband,’ he continued.
‘Yes. I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a
widow, as I should have liked.’
‘True. I am known here a little.’
‘I didn’t mean on that account—for as I said I didn’t
expect you. It was for other reasons.’
‘What were they?’
‘I don’t care to go into them,’ she replied evasively. ‘I
make a very good living, and I don’t know that I want your
company.’
Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a
lady’s eyebrow, came and asked for a curiously
compounded drink, and Arabella was obliged to go and
attend to him. ‘We can’t talk here,’ she said, stepping back
a moment. ‘Can’t you wait till nine? Say yes, and don’t be a
fool. I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask. I
am not living in the house at present.’
He reflected and said gloomily, ‘I’ll come back. I suppose
we’d better arrange something.’
‘O bother arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything!’
‘But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can’t
talk here. Very well; I’ll call for you.’
Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked
up and down the street. Here was a rude flounce into the
pellucid sentimentality of his sad attachment to Sue.
Though Arabella’s word was absolutely untrustworthy, he
thought there might be some truth in her implication that
she had not wished to disturb him, and had really supposed
him dead. However, there was only one thing now to be
done, and that was to play a straightforward part, the law
being the law, and the woman between whom and himself
there was no more unity than between east and west being
in the eye of the Church one person with him.
Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet
Sue at Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of
this a pang had gone through him; but the conjuncture
could not be helped. Arabella was perhaps an intended
intervention to punish him for his unauthorized love. Passing
the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the
town wherein he avoided the precincts of every Cloister and
Hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired
to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were
resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a
coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous irony. The inn
was now brilliantly lighted up, and the scene was altogether
more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen
in colour, each having a pink flush on her cheek; their
manners were still more vivacious than before—more
abandoned, more excited, more sensuous, and they
expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically,
laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.
 The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during
the previous hour, and he had heard from without the
hubbub of their voices; but the customers were fewer at
last. He nodded to Arabella, and told her that she would find
him outside the door when she came away.
‘But you must have something with me first,’ she said
with great good-humour. ‘Just an early night-cap: I always
do. Then you can go out and wait a minute, as it is best we
should not be seen going together.’ She drew a couple of
liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had evidently,
from her countenance, already taken in enough alcohol
either by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere
she had breathed for so many hours, she finished hers
quickly. He also drank his, and went outside the house.
In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat
with a black feather. ‘I live quite near,’ she said, taking his
arm, ‘and can let myself in by a latch-key at any time. What
arrangement do you want to come to?’
‘O—none in particular,’ he answered, thoroughly sick and
tired, his thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the
train he did not go by; the probable disappointment of Sue
that he was there when she arrived, and the missed
pleasure of her company on the long and lonely climb by
starlight up the hills to Marygreen. ‘I ought to have gone
back really! My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear.’
‘I’ll go over with you to-morrow morning. I think I could
get a day off.’
There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea
of Arabella, who had no more sympathy than a tigress with
his relations or him, coming to the bedside of his dying aunt,
and meeting Sue. Yet he said, ‘Of course, if you’d like to, you
can.’
‘Well, that we’ll consider.… Now, until we have come to
some agreement it is awkward our being together here—
where you are known, and I am getting known, though
without any suspicion that I have anything to do with you.
As we are going towards the station suppose we take the
nine-forty train to Aldbrickham? We shall be there in little
more than half-an-hour, and nobody will know us for one
night, and we shall be quite free to act as we choose till we
have made up our minds whether we’ll make anything
public or not.’
‘As you like.’
‘Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging.
Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am
engaged, so nobody will think anything of my staying out.’
She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway,
and made the half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham, where
they entered a third-rate inn near the station in time for a
late supper.

III–9
On the morrow between nine and half-past they were
journeying back to Christminster, the only two occupants of
a compartment in a third-class railway-carriage. Having, like
Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to catch the train, Arabella
looked a little frowsy, and her face was very far from
possessing the animation which had characterized it at the
bar the night before. When they came out of the station she
found that she still had half-an-hour to spare before she was
due at the bar. They walked in silence a little way out of the
town in the direction of Alfredston. Jude looked up the far
highway.
‘Ah … poor feeble me!’ he murmured at last.
‘What?’ said she.
‘This is the very road by which I came into Christminster
years ago full of plans!’
‘Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as
I have to be in the bar by eleven o’clock. And as I said, I
shan’t ask for the day to go with you to see your aunt. So
perhaps we had better part here. I’d sooner not walk up
Chief Street with you, since we’ve come to no conclusion at
all.’
‘Very well. But you said when we were getting up this
morning that you had something you wished to tell me
before I left?’
‘So I had—two things—one in particular. But you wouldn’t
promise to keep it a secret. I’ll tell you now if you promise?
As an honest woman I wish you to know it.… It was what I
began telling you in the night—about the gentleman who
managed the Sydney hotel.’ Arabella spoke somewhat
hurriedly for her. ‘You’ll keep it close?’
‘Yes—yes—I promise!’ said Jude impatiently. ‘Of course I
don’t want to reveal your secrets.’
‘Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that
he was much taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me
to marry him. I never thought of coming back to England
again; and being out there in Australia, with no home of my
own after leaving my father, I at last agreed, and did’
‘What—marry him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Regularly—legally—in church?’
‘Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left. It was
stupid, I know; but I did! There, now I’ve told you. Don’t
round upon me! He talks of coming back to England, poor
old chap. But if he does, he won’t be likely to find me.’
Jude stood pale and fixed.
‘Why the devil didn’t you tell me last night!’ he said.
‘Well—I didn’t.… Won’t you make it up with me, then?’
‘So in talking of “your husband” to the bar gentlemen you
meant him, of course—not me!’
‘Of course.… Come, don’t fuss about it.’
‘I have nothing more to say!’ replied Jude. ‘I have nothing
at all to say about the—crime—you’ve confessed to!’
‘Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over
there! Lots of ’em do it.… Well, if you take it like that I shall
go back to him! He was very fond of me, and we lived
honourable enough, and as respectable as any married
couple in the Colony! How did I know where you were?’
‘I won’t go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but
perhaps it would be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?’
‘Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell you;
but I fancy we’ve seen enough of one another for the
present! I shall think over what you said about your
circumstances, and let you know.’
Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the
direction of the hotel, and entered the railway station close
by. Finding that it wanted three-quarters of an hour of the
time at which he could get a train back to Alfredston, he
strolled mechanically into the city as far as to the Fourways,
where he stood as he had so often stood before, and
surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its college after
college, in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such
Continental vistas as the Street of Palaces in Genoa; the
lines of the buildings being as distinct in the morning air as
in an architectural drawing. But Jude was far from seeing or
criticizing these things; they were hidden by an
indescribable consciousness of Arabella’s midnight
contiguity, a sense of degradation at his revived
experiences with her, of her appearance as she lay asleep
at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as of one
accurst. If he could only have felt resentment towards her
he would have been less unhappy; but he pitied while he
contemned her.
Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again
towards the station he started at hearing his name
pronounced—less at the name than at the voice. To his great
surprise no other than Sue stood like a vision before him—
her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth
nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.
‘O Jude—I am so glad—to meet you like this!’ she said in
quick, uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed
as she observed his thought that they had not met since her
marriage.
They looked away from each other to hide their emotion,
took each other’s hand without further speech, and went on
together awhile, till she glanced at him with furtive
solicitude. ‘I arrived at Alfredston station last night, as you
asked me to, and there was nobody to meet me! But I
reached Marygreen alone, and they told me aunt was a trifle
better. I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I
was frightened about you—I thought that perhaps, when
you found yourself back in the old city, you were upset at—
at thinking I was—married, and not there as I used to be;
and that you had nobody to speak to; so you had tried to
drown your gloom!—as you did at that former time when
you were disappointed about entering as a student, and had
forgotten your promise to me that you never would again.
And this, I thought, was why you hadn’t come to meet me!’
‘And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good
angel!’
‘I thought I would come by the morning train and try to
find you—in case—in case—’
‘I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall
never break out again as I did, I am sure. I may have been
doing nothing better, but I was not doing that—I loathe the
thought of it.’
‘I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that. But,’
she said, the faintest pout entering into her tone, ‘you didn’t
come back last night and meet me, as you engaged to!’
‘I didn’t—I am sorry to say. I had an appointment at nine
o’clock—too late for me to catch the train that would have
met yours, or to get home at all.’
Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in
his tender thought the sweetest and most disinterested
comrade that he had ever had, living largely in vivid
imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be
seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily ashamed
of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in
Arabella’s company. There was something rude and immoral
in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of
one who, to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times
impossible as a human wife to any average man. And yet
she was Phillotson’s. How she had become such, how she
lived as such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her
to-day.
‘You’ll go back with me?’ he said. ‘There’s a train just now.
I wonder how my aunt is by this time.… And so, Sue, you
really came on my account all this way! At what an early
time you must have started, poor thing!’
‘Yes. Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for
you, and instead of going to bed when it got light I started.
And now you won’t frighten me like this again about your
morals for nothing?’
He was not so sure that she had been frightened about
his morals for nothing. He released her hand till they had
entered the train,—it seemed the same carriage he had
lately got out of with another—where they sat down side by
side, Sue between him and the window. He regarded the
delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight, apple-like
convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella’s
amplitudes. Though she knew he was looking at her she did
not turn to him, but kept her eyes forward, as if afraid that
by meeting his own some troublous discussion would be
initiated.
‘Sue—you are married now, you know, like me; and yet
we have been in such a hurry that we have not said a word
about it!’
‘There’s no necessity,’ she quickly returned.
‘O well—perhaps not.… But I wish—’
‘Jude—don’t talk about me—I wish you wouldn’t!’ she
entreated. ‘It distresses me, rather. Forgive my saying it! …
Where did you stay last night?’
 She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to
change the topic. He knew that, and said merely, ‘At an inn,’
though it would have been a relief to tell her of his meeting
with an unexpected one. But the latter’s final
announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered him
lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.
Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached
Alfredston. That Sue was not as she had been, but was
labelled ‘Phillotson,’ paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to
commune with her as an individual. Yet she seemed
unaltered—he could not say why. There remained the five-
mile extra journey into the country, which it was just as easy
to walk as to drive, the greater part of it being uphill. Jude
had never before in his life gone that road with Sue, though
he had with another. It was now as if he carried a bright light
which temporarily banished the shady associations of the
earlier time.
Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the
conversation from herself. At length he inquired if her
husband were well.
‘O yes,’ she said. ‘He is obliged to be in the school all the
day, or would have come with me. He is so good and kind
that to accompany me he would have dismissed the school
for once, even against his principles—for he is strongly
opposed to giving casual holidays—only I wouldn’t let him. I
felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt Drusilla, I knew,
was so very eccentric; and his being almost a stranger to
her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns
out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.’
Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson
was being expressed. ‘Mr. Phillotson obliges you in
everything, as he ought,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘You ought to be a happy wife.’
‘And of course I am.’
 ‘Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many
weeks since I gave you to him, and—’
‘Yes, I know! I know!’ There was something in her face
which belied her late assuring words, so strictly proper and
so lifelessly spoken that they might have been taken from a
list of model speeches in ‘The Wife’s Guide to Conduct.’50
Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue’s voice,
could read every symptom of her mental condition; and he
was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not
been a month married. But her rushing away thus from
home, to see the last of a relative whom she had hardly
known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue naturally did such
things as those.
‘Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs.
Phillotson.’
She reproached him by a glance.
‘No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,’ murmured Jude. ‘You are
dear, free Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it! Wifedom
has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw
as an atom which has no further individuality.’
Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered,
‘Nor has husbandom you, so far as I can see!’
‘But it has!’ he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the firs,
between the Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and
Arabella had lived and quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A
squalid family lived there now. He could not help saying to
Sue: ‘That’s the house my wife and I occupied the whole of
the time we lived together. I brought her home to that
house.’
She looked at it. ‘That to you was what the school-house
at Shaston is to me.’
‘Yes; but I was not very happy there, as you are in yours.’
She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked
some way till she glanced at him to see how he was taking
it. ‘Of course I may have exaggerated your happiness—one
never knows,’ he continued blandly.
‘Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you
may have said it to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man
can be, and gives me perfect liberty—which elderly
husbands don’t do in general.… If you think I am not happy
because he’s too old for me, you are wrong.’
‘I don’t think anything against him—to you, dear.’
‘And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?’
‘I will not.’
He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or
other, in taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she
had done what she ought not to have done.51
They plunged into the concave field on the other side of
which rose the village—the field wherein Jude had received
a thrashing from the farmer many years earlier. On
ascending to the village and approaching the house they
found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them
lifted her hands deprecatingly. ‘She’s downstairs, if you’ll
believe me!’ cried the widow. ‘Out o’ bed she got, and
nothing could turn her. What will come o’t I do not know!’
On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old
woman, wrapped in blankets, and turning upon them a
countenance like that of Sebastiano’s Lazarus.52 They must
have looked their amazement, for she said in a hollow voice:
‘Ah—sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there
no longer, to please nobody! ’Tis more than flesh and blood
can bear, to be ordered to do this and that by a feller that
don’t know half as well as you do yourself! … Ah—you’ll rue
this marrying as well as he!’ she added, turning to Sue. ‘All
our family do,—and nearly all everybody else’s. You should
have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson the
schoolmaster, of all men! What made ’ee marry him?’
‘What makes most women marry, aunt?’
‘Ah! You mean to say you loved the man!’
‘I don’t mean to say anything definite.’
 ‘Do ye love un?’
‘Don’t ask me, aunt.’
‘I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable
liver; but Lord!—I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but—
there be certain men here and there that no woman of any
niceness can stomach. I should have said he was one. I
don’t say so now, since you must ha’ known better than I,—
but that’s what I should have said!’
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and
found her in the outhouse, crying.
‘Don’t cry, dear!’ said Jude in distress. ‘She means well,
but is very crusty and queer now, you know.’
‘O no—it isn’t that!’ said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. ‘I
don’t mind her roughness one bit.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It is that what she says is—is true!’
‘God—what—you don’t like him?’ asked Jude.
‘I don’t mean that!’ she said hastily. ‘That I ought—
perhaps I ought not to have married!’
He wondered if she had really been going to say that at
first. They went back, and the subject was smoothed over,
and her aunt took rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not
many young women newly married would have come so far
to see a sick old crone like her. In the afternoon Sue
prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive her to
Alfredston.
‘I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?’ he said.
She would not let him. The man came round with the trap,
and Jude helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary
attention, for she looked at him prohibitively.
‘I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am
back again at Melchester?’ he half-crossly observed.
She bent down and said softly: ‘No, dear—you are not to
come yet. I don’t think you are in a good mood.’
‘Very well,’ said Jude. ‘Good-bye!’
‘Good-bye!’ She waved her hand and was gone.
 ‘She’s right! I won’t go!’ he murmured.
He passed the evening and following days in mortifying
by every possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving
himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate
tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline; and
hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the
Ascetics of the second century.53 Before he had returned
from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter from
Arabella. The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of self-
condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his
attachment to Sue.
The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead
of the Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few
days after their parting in the morning at Christminster, she
had been surprised by an affectionate letter from her
Australian husband, formerly manager of the hotel in
Sydney. He had come to England on purpose to find her; and
had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he
wished her to join him in conducting the business, which
was likely to be a very thriving one, the house being
situated in an excellent, densely populated, gin-drinking
neighbourhood, and already doing a trade of £200 a month,
which could be easily doubled.
As he had said that he loved her very much still, and
implored her to tell him where she was, and as they had
only parted in a slight tiff, and as her engagement in
Christminster was only temporary, she had just gone to join
him as he urged. She could not help feeling that she
belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly
married him, and had lived with him much longer than with
her first husband. In thus wishing Jude good-bye she bore
him no ill-will, and trusted he would not turn upon her, a
weak woman, and inform against her, and bring her to ruin
now that she had a chance of improving her circumstances
and leading a genteel life.
 III–10
Jude returned to Melchester, which had the questionable
recommendation of being only a dozen and a half miles
from his Sue’s now permanent residence. At first he felt that
this nearness was a distinct reason for not going southward
at all; but Christminster was too sad a place to bear, while
the proximity of Shaston to Melchester might afford him the
glory of worsting the Enemy54 in a close engagement, such
as was deliberately sought by the priests and virgins of the
early Church, who, disdaining an ignominious flight from
temptation, became even chamber-partners with impunity.
Jude did not pause to remember that, in the laconic words of
the historian, ‘insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her
rights’55 in such circumstances.
He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for
the priesthood—in the recognition that the single-
mindedness of his aims, and his fidelity to the cause, had
been more than questionable of late. His passion for Sue
troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to the society
of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse
thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney
husband till afterwards. He had, he verily believed,
overcome all tendency to fly to liquor—which, indeed, he
had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from
intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with
despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too
many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he
could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare
between flesh and spirit the former might not always be
victorious.
As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he
developed his slight skill in church-music and thorough-
bass,56 till he could join in part-singing from notation with
some accuracy. A mile or two from Melchester there was a
restored village church, to which Jude had originally gone to
fix the new columns and capitals. By this means he had
become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate
result was that he joined the choir as a bass voice.
He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and
sometimes in the week. One evening about Easter the choir
met for practice, and a new hymn which Jude had heard of
as being by a Wessex composer was to be tried and
prepared for the following week. It turned out to be a
strangely emotional composition. As they all sang it over
and over again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved
him exceedingly.
When they had finished he went round to the organist to
make inquiries. The score was in manuscript, the name of
the composer being at the head, together with the title of
the hymn: ‘The Foot of the Cross.’
‘Yes,’ said the organist. ‘He is a local man. He is a
professional musician at Kennetbridge—between here and
Christminster. The vicar knows him. He was brought up and
educated in Christminster traditions, which accounts for the
quality of the piece. I think he plays in the large church
there, and has a surpliced choir. He comes to Melchester
sometimes, and once tried to get the Cathedral organ when
the post was vacant. The hymn is getting about everywhere
this Easter.’
As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell
to musing on its composer, and the reasons why he
composed it. What a man of sympathies he must be!
Perplexed and harassed as he himself was about Sue and
Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the
complication of his position, how he would like to know that
man! ‘He of all men would understand my difficulties,’ said
the impulsive Jude. If there were any person in the world to
choose as a confidant, this composer would be the one, for
he must have suffered, and throbbed, and yearned.
In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the
journey, Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to
Kennetbridge the very next Sunday. He duly started, early in
the morning, for it was only by a series of crooked railways
that he could get to the town. About mid-day he reached it,
and crossing the bridge into the quaint old borough he
inquired for the house of the composer.
They told him it was a red brick building some little way
further on. Also that the gentleman himself had just passed
along the street not five minutes before.
‘Which way?’ asked Jude with alacrity.
‘Straight along homeward from church.’
Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing
a man in a black coat and a black slouched felt hat no
considerable distance ahead. Stretching out his legs yet
more widely he stalked after. ‘A hungry soul in pursuit of a
full soul!’ he said. ‘I must speak to that man!’
He could not, however, overtake the musician before he
had entered his own house, and then arose the question if
this were an expedient time to call. Whether or not he
decided to do so there and then, now that he had got here,
the distance home being too great for him to wait till late in
the afternoon. This man of soul would understand scant
ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in
which an earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly
obtained entrance into his heart through the opening
afforded for religion.
Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.
The musician came to him in a moment, and being
respectably dressed, good-looking, and frank in manner,
Jude obtained a favourable reception. He was nevertheless
conscious that there would be a certain awkwardness in
explaining his errand.
‘I have been singing in the choir of a little church near
Melchester,’ he said. ‘And we have this week practised “The
Foot of the Cross,” which I understand, sir, that you
composed?’
‘I did—a year or so ago.’
 ‘I—like it. I think it supremely beautiful!’
‘Ah well—other people have said so too. Yes, there’s
money in it, if I could only see about getting it published. I
have other compositions to go with it, too; I wish I could
bring them out; for I haven’t made a five-pound note out of
any of them yet. These publishing people—they want the
copyright of an obscure composer’s work, such as mine is,
for almost less than I should have to pay a person for
making a fair manuscript copy of the score. The one you
speak of I have lent to various friends about here and
Melchester, and so it has got to be sung a little. But music is
a poor staff to lean on—I am giving it up entirely. You must
go into trade if you want to make money nowadays. The
wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my
forthcoming list—it is not issued yet—but you can take one.’
He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in
booklet shape, ornamentally margined with a red line, in
which were set forth the various clarets, champagnes, ports,
sherries, and other wines with which he purposed to initiate
his new venture. It took Jude more than by surprise that the
man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt that he
could not open up his confidences.
They talked a little longer, but constrainedly, for when the
musician found that Jude was a poor man his manner
changed from what it had been while Jude’s appearance and
address deceived him as to his position and pursuits. Jude
stammered out something about his feelings in wishing to
congratulate the author on such an exalted composition,
and took an embarrassed leave.57
All the way home by the slow Sunday train, sitting in the
tireless waiting-rooms on this cold spring day, he was
depressed enough at his simplicity in taking such a journey.
But no sooner did he reach his Melchester lodging that he
found awaiting him a letter which had arrived that morning
a few minutes after he had left the house. It was a contrite
little note from Sue, in which she said, with sweet humility,
that she felt she had been horrid in telling him he was not to
come to see her; that she despised herself for having been
so conventional; and that he was to be sure to come by the
eleven-forty-five train that very Sunday, and have dinner
with them at half-past one.
Jude almost tore his hair at having missed this letter till it
was too late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened
himself considerably of late, and at last his chimerical58
expedition to Kennetbridge really did seem to have been
another special intervention of Providence to keep him away
from temptation. But a growing impatience of faith, which
he had noticed in himself more than once of late, made him
pass over in ridicule the idea that God sent people on fools’
errands. He longed to see her; he was angry at having
missed her: and he wrote instantly, telling her what had
happened, and saying he had not enough patience to wait
till the following Sunday, but would come any day in the
week that she liked to name.
Since he wrote a little over-ardently, Sue, as her manner
was, delayed her reply till Thursday before Good Friday,
when she said he might come that afternoon if he wished,
this being the earliest day on which she could welcome him,
for she was now assistant-teacher in her husband’s school.
Jude therefore got leave from the Cathedral works at the
trifling expense of a stoppage of pay, and went.
 1. Sappho was a poet of ancient Greece. Wharton’s translation was published in
1885.
2. “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest … all the days of thy vanity”
(Ecclesiastes 9.9). “Hind”: peasant.
3. Death stroke, final blow.
4. Thus Sue was qualified to attend a teachers’ training college.
5. Jesus Christ.
6. Future way of life. The final part of Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) is
titled “Aftercourses.”
7. Teachers’ training college. Hardy’s two sisters had been students at the
teachers’ college in Salisbury, the original of “Melchester.” The college was
founded in 1841 and by 1860 was established in the King’s House in the
Cathedral Close.
8. One that does not serve alcohol.
9. Salisbury Cathedral, which has the tallest spire in England. It was much
admired by Hardy, who frequently visited it.
10. Spanish painting flourished in the 17th century, with Diego Velásquez (1599–
1660) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) as its leading figures. The
school became better known in the rest of Europe during the 19th century.
Hardy studied it while living in London in the 1860s.
11. Mulberry-colored; purple-red.
12. Sue is recalling Shakespeare’s sonnet 111.
13. William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Joseph Butler’s Analogy
of Religion (1736) were standard theological works.
14. In Wiltshire; designed by James Paine and built in 1770–76.
15. Fonthill Abbey, built for the writer William Beckford in mock-Gothic style in
1796–1807, was also in Wiltshire.
16. The most ornate of the three orders of Greek architecture.
17. Italian painters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
18. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), an English painter. Sir Peter Lely (1618–
1680), principal painter to Charles II. Their portraits of fashionable and
worldly subjects are contrasted with the religious paintings admired by Jude.
19. China (dialect).
20. Chamber (dialect).
21. Outcast or nonconformist. Ishmael was the “wild man,” son of Abram and
Hagar (Genesis 16.11–12).
22. Letter of complaint or request with signatures arranged in a circle to conceal
the order in which the names were written.
23. A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church … was published in forty-
eight volumes (1838–81, nearly all appearing before 1853). Volume 29 (1849)
contains Saint Augustine’s homilies on the Gospel of John.
24. The famous sculptures from the temple of Athena in Athens. Hardy had seen
them in the British Museum.
25. Sixpennyworth.
26. Writers notable, by Victorian standards, for frankness or indecency. In the
latter part of 1890, Hardy had been reading “mostly the satirists,” including
Martial, Lucian, and Tobias Smollett (Life, p. 230).
27. From Robert Browning’s poem “Too Late.”
28. From Matthew 9.17.
29. From Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine.”
30. The Tractarian movement, or Oxford movement, flourished in England
between 1833 and 1845. Its spokesmen, who included Newman, Keble, and
Pusey, urged the revival of the original doctrines of the Christian church. The
name is derived from a series of influential Tracts for the Times (1833–41).
31. Pamphlets, each with a few leaves stitched together.
32. Like Voltaire, noted for his “lack of respect for existing institutions and
contempt for authority.”
33. Song of Solomon 6.1. This ancient erotic poem was interpreted by
churchmen as a religious allegory.
34. Greek mathematician whose work on geometry was a standard textbook.
35. In Greek mythology, a beautiful youth who was cupbearer to the gods.
36. Food eaten by a laborer first thing in the morning, breakfast being taken
after a period of work (dialect).
37. One in charge of a school established by the National Society, which had
been founded in 1811 to promote the education of the poor.
38. Originally a temple devoted to all the gods.
39. Associated with intellectual as opposed to physical love.
40. The middle names may recall Florence Henniker and Mary Head, Hardy’s
grandmother, who had lived in Fawley in early life.
41. Immediately.
42. The Spartans, a people of ancient Greece, had a reputation for great courage
and self-control.
43. Late medieval style of English church architecture.
44. Woman hired for rough housework.
45. From Robert Browning’s poem “The Worst of It.”
46. Light carriage.
47. An up-train goes toward London; a down-train, away from London.
48. A liqueur flavored with orange peel.
49. Nonconformist minister (as opposed to a clergyman of the established
church).
50. Conduct literature for women was plentiful: Augusta Johnstone, A Woman’s
Preachings for Woman’s Practice (1861) and the Reverend J. Hitchens, A
Ministering Angel: And How to Become One (1890) are characteristic.
51. Echoes the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer.
52. The Raising of Lazarus, painted in 1517–18 by Sebastiano Del Piombo; Hardy
had seen it in the National Gallery, London.
53. Early Christians who practiced rigorous self-discipline and self-denial.
54. The devil—here, specifically, sexual temptation.
55. Gibbon, Decline and Fall I.15.
56. Method of indicating harmony by figures attached to a single line of music.
57. This episode is said to be based on an actual event in the life of the
composer Louis Spohr.
58. Based only on fancy or delusion (from the chimera, a mythical monster).

Part Fourth: At Shaston

‘Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good
of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or
Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee.’
—J. Milton1

IV–1
Shaston,2 the ancient British Palladour,
‘From whose foundation first such strange reports
arise,’
(as Drayton3 sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a
dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its
magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex,
its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its
gabled freestone4 mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away
—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive
melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless
landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the
burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses,
saints and bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King
Edward ‘the Martyr,’5 carefully removed hither for holy
preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the
resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it
to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English
shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the
Dissolution6 was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With
the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place
collapsed in a general ruin: the Martyr’s bones met with the
fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is
now left to tell where they lie.
 The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town
still remain; but strange to say these qualities, which were
noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to
have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one
of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands
virtually unvisited to-day.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and
imposing scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of
the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the
view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant
pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden
a surprise to the unexpectant traveller’s eyes as the
medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to a railway, it can
best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is
hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on
that side.
Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston
or Palladour. Its situation rendered water the great want of
the town; and within living memory, horses, donkeys and
men may have been seen toiling up the winding ways to the
top of the height, laden with tubs and barrels filled from the
wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers retailing their
contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.
This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other
odd facts, namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as
steeply as a roof behind the church, and that in former
times the town passed through a curious period of
corruption, conventual and domestic, gave rise to the saying
that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man,
such as the world afforded not elsewhere. It was a place
where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church
steeple, where beer was more plentiful than water, and
where there were more wanton women than honest wives
and maids. It is also said that after the middle ages the
inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests, and hence
were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain
altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity which
they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on
Sunday afternoons. In those days the Shastonians were
apparently not without a sense of humour.
There was another peculiarity—this a modern one—which
Shaston appeared to owe to its site. It was the resting-place
and headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans,
shows, shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns,
whose business lay largely at fairs and markets. As strange
wild birds are seen assembled on some lofty promontory,
meditatively pausing for longer flights, or to return by the
course they followed thither, so here, in this clifftown, stood
in stultified silence the yellow and green caravans bearing
names not local, as if surprised by a change in the
landscape so violent as to hinder their further progress; and
here they usually remained all the winter till they turned to
seek again their old tracks in the following spring.
It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that Jude
ascended from the nearest station for the first time in his
life about four o’clock one afternoon, and entering on the
summit of the peak after a toilsome climb, passed the first
houses of the aerial town; and drew towards the school-
house. The hour was too early; the pupils were still in
school, humming small, like a swarm of gnats; and he
withdrew a few steps along Abbey Walk, whence he
regarded the spot which fate had made the home of all he
loved best in the world. In front of the schools, which were
extensive and stone-built, grew two enormous beeches with
smooth mouse-coloured trunks, as such trees will only grow
on chalk uplands. Within the mullioned and transomed
windows he could see the black, brown, and flaxen crowns
of the scholars over the sills, and to pass the time away he
walked down to the level terrace where the Abbey gardens
once had spread, his heart throbbing in spite of him.
 Unwilling to enter till the children were dismissed he
remained here till young voices could be heard in the open
air, and girls in white pinafores over red and blue frocks
appeared dancing along the paths which the abbess,
prioress, sub-prioress, and fifty nuns had demurely paced
three centuries earlier. Retracing his steps he found that he
had waited too long, and that Sue had gone out into the
town at the heels of the last scholar, Mr. Phillotson having
been absent all the afternoon at a teachers’ meeting at
Shottsford.
Jude went into the empty schoolroom and sat down, the
girl who was sweeping the floor having informed him that
Mrs. Phillotson would be back again in a few minutes. A
piano stood near—actually the old piano that Phillotson had
possessed at Marygreen—and though the dark afternoon
almost prevented him seeing the notes Jude touched them
in his humble way, and could not help modulating into the
hymn which had so affected him in the previous week.
A figure moved behind him, and thinking it was still the
girl with the broom Jude took no notice, till the person came
close and laid her fingers lightly upon his bass hand. The
imposed hand was a little one he seemed to know, and he
turned.
“Don’t stop,’ said Sue. ‘I like it. I learnt it before I left
Melchester. They used to play it in the Training School.’
‘I can’t strum before you! Play it for me.’
‘O well—I don’t mind.’
Sue sat down, and her rendering of the piece, though not
remarkable, seemed divine as compared with his own. She,
like him, was evidently touched—to her own surprise—by
the recalled air; and when she had finished, and he moved
his hand towards hers, it met his own half-way. Jude grasped
it—just as he had done before her marriage.
‘It is odd,’ she said, in a voice quite changed, ‘that I
should care about that air; because—’
‘Because what?’
 ‘I am not that sort—quite.’
‘Not easily moved?’
‘I didn’t quite mean that.’
‘O, but you are one of that sort, for you are just like me at
heart!’
‘But not at head.’
She played on, and suddenly turned round; and by an
unpremeditated instinct each clasped the other’s hand
again.
She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his
quickly. ‘How funny!’ she said. ‘I wonder what we both did
that for?’
‘I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before.’
‘Not in our thoughts! Perhaps a little in our feelings.’
‘And they rule thoughts.… Isn’t it enough to make one
blaspheme that the composer of that hymn is one of the
most commonplace men I ever met!’
‘What—you know him?’
‘I went to see him.’
‘O you goose—to do just what I should have done! Why
did you?’
‘Because we are not alike,’ he said drily.
‘Now we’ll have some tea,’ said Sue. ‘Shall we have it
here instead of in my house? It is no trouble to get the kettle
and things brought in. We don’t live at the school, you know,
but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old-Grove
Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me
dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live
in—I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many
previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools
there is only your own life to support. Sit down, and I’ll tell
Ada to bring the tea-things across.’
He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she
flung open before going out, and when she returned,
followed by the maiden with tea, they sat down by the same
light, assisted by the blue rays of a spirit-lamp under the
brass kettle on the stand.
‘This is one of your wedding-presents to me,’ she said,
signifying the latter.
‘Yes,’ said Jude.
The kettle of his gift sang with some satire in its note, to
his mind; and to change the subject he said. ‘Do you know
of any good readable edition of the uncanonical7 books of
the New Testament? You don’t read them in the school, I
suppose?’
‘O dear no!—’twould alarm the neighbourhood.… Yes,
there is one. I am not familiar with it now, though I was
interested in it when my former friend was alive. Cowper’s
Apocryphal Gospels.’
‘That sounds like what I want.’ His thoughts, however,
reverted with a twinge to the ‘former friend’—by whom she
meant, as he knew, the University comrade of her earlier
days. He wondered if she talked of him to Phillotson.
‘The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice,’ she went on, to
keep him from his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly,
as she always did. Indeed when they talked on an indifferent
subject, as now, there was ever a second silent conversation
passing between their emotions, so perfect was the
reciprocity between them. ‘It is quite like the genuine
article. All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like one of the
other evangelists read in a dream, when things are the
same, yet not the same. But, Jude, do you take an interest in
those questions still? Are you getting up Apologetica?’8
‘Yes. I am reading Divinity harder than ever.’
She regarded him curiously.’
‘Why do you look at me like that?’ said Jude.
‘Oh—why do you want to know?’
‘I am sure you can tell me anything I may be ignorant of
in that subject. You must have learnt a lot of everything
from your dear dead friend!’
 ‘We won’t get on to that now!’ she coaxed. ‘Will you be
carving out at that church again next week, where you
learnt the pretty hymn?’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘That will be very nice. Shall I come and see you there? It
is in this direction, and I could come any afternoon by train
for half-an-hour?’
‘No. Don’t come!’
‘What—aren’t we going to be friends, then, any longer, as
we used to be?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t know that. I thought you were always going to be
kind to me!’
‘No, I am not.’
‘What have I done, then? I am sure I thought we two—’
The tremolo in her voice caused her to break off.
‘Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt,’ said he abruptly.
There was a momentary pause, till she suddenly jumped
up; and to his surprise he saw by the kettle-flame that her
face was flushed.
‘I can’t talk to you any longer, Jude!’ she said, the tragic
contralto note having come back as of old. ‘It is getting too
dark to stay together like this, after playing morbid Good
Friday tunes that make one feel what one shouldn’t! … We
mustn’t sit and talk in this way any more. Yes—you must go
away, for you mistake me! I am very much the reverse of
what you say so cruelly—O Jude, it was cruel to say that! Yet
I can’t tell you the truth—I should shock you by letting you
know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel
that I shouldn’t have been provided with attractiveness
unless it were meant to be exercised! Some women’s love of
being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of
loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t
give it continuously to the chamber-office appointed by the
bishop’s license to receive it. But you are so straightforward,
Jude, that you can’t understand me! … Now you must go. I
am sorry my husband is not at home.’
‘Are you?’
‘I perceive I have said that in mere convention! Honestly I
don’t think I am sorry. It does not matter, either way, sad to
say!’
As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time
sooner, she touched his fingers but lightly when he went out
now. He had hardly gone from the door when, with a
dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form and opened the iron
casement of a window beneath which he was passing in the
path without. ‘When do you leave here to catch your train,
Jude?’ she asked.
He looked up in some surprise. ‘The coach that runs to
meet it goes in three-quarters of an hour or so.’
‘What will you do with yourself for the time?’
‘O—wander about, I suppose. Perhaps I shall go and sit in
the old church.’
‘It does seem hard of me to pack you off so! You have
thought enough of churches, Heavens knows, without going
into one in the dark. Stay there.’
‘Where?’
‘Where you are. I can talk to you better like this than
when you were inside.… It was so kind and tender of you to
give up half a day’s work to come to see me! … You are
Joseph the dreamer of dreams,9 dear Jude. And a tragic Don
Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while
they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened.10 O my
poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!’
Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that
he could not get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in
a frankness she had feared at close quarters. ‘I have been
thinking,’ she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of
feeling, ‘that the social moulds civilization fits us into have
no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional
shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I
am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life
with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs.
Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone,
with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.…
Now you mustn’t wait longer, or you will lose the coach.
Come and see me again. You must come to the house then.’
‘Yes!’ said Jude. ‘When shall it be?’
‘To-morrow week. Good-bye—good-bye!’ She stretched
out her hand and stroked his forehead pitifully—just once.
Jude said goodbye, and went away into the darkness.
Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the
wheels of the coach departing, and, truly enough, when he
reached the Duke’s Arms in the Market Place the coach had
gone. It was impossible for him to get to the station on foot
in time for this train, and he settled himself perforce to wait
for the next—the last to Melchester that night.
He wandered about awhile, obtaining something to eat;
and then, having another half-hour on his hands, his feet
involuntarily took him through the venerable graveyard of
Trinity Church, with its avenues of limes, in the direction of
the schools again. They were entirely in darkness. She had
said she lived over the way at Old-Grove Place, a house
which he soon discovered from her description of its
antiquity.
A glimmering candle-light shone from a front window, the
shutters being yet unclosed. He could see the interior
clearly—the floor sinking a couple of steps below the road
without, which had become raised during the centuries
since the house was built. Sue, evidently just come in, was
standing with her hat on in this front parlour or sitting-room,
whose walls were lined with wainscoting of panelled oak
reaching from floor to ceiling, the latter being crossed by
huge moulded beams only a little way above her head. The
mantelpiece was of the same heavy description, carved with
Jacobean pilasters and scroll-work. The centuries did,
indeed, ponderously overhang a young wife who passed her
time here.
She had opened a rosewood work-box, and was looking at
a photograph. Having contemplated it a little while she
pressed it against her bosom, and put it again in its place.
Then becoming aware that she had not obscured the
windows she came forward to do so, candle in hand. It was
too dark for her to see Jude without, but he could see her
face distinctly, and there was an unmistakable tearfulness
about the dark, long-lashed eyes.
She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away to pursue
his solitary journey home. ‘Whose photograph was she
looking at?’ he said. He had once given her his; but she had
others, he knew. Yet it was his, surely?
He knew he should go to see her again, according to her
invitation. Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom
Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demi-gods, would
have shunned such encounters if they doubted their own
strength. But he could not. He might fast and pray during
the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him
than the Divine.

IV–2
However, if God disposed not, woman did.11 The next
morning but one brought him this note from her:
‘Don’t come next week. On your own account don’t!
We were too free, under the influence of that morbid
hymn and the twilight. Think no more than you can
help of
Susanna Florence Mary.’
The disappointment was keen. He knew her mood, the
look of her face, when she subscribed herself at length thus.
But whatever her mood he could not say she was wrong in
her view. He replied:
 ‘I acquiesce. You are right. It is a lesson in
renunciation which I suppose I ought to learn at this
season. Jude.’
He despatched the note on Easter Eve, and there seemed
a finality in their decisions. But other forces and laws than
theirs were in operation. On Easter Monday morning he
received a message from the Widow Edlin, whom he had
directed to telegraph if anything serious happened:
‘Your aunt is sinking. Come at once.’
He threw down his tools and went. Three and a half hours
later he was crossing the downs about Marygreen, and
presently plunged into the concave field across which the
short cut was made to the village. As he ascended on the
other side a labouring man, who had been watching his
approach from a gate across the path, moved uneasily, and
prepared to speak. ‘I can see in his face that she is dead,’
said Jude. ‘Poor Aunt Drusilla!’
It was as he had supposed, and Mrs. Edlin had sent out
the man to break the news to him.
‘She wouldn’t have knowed ’ee. She lay like a doll wi’
glass eyes; so it didn’t matter that you wasn’t here,’ said he.
Jude went on to the house, and in the afternoon, when
everything was done, and the layers-out12 had finished their
beer, and gone, he sat down alone in the silent place. It was
absolutely necessary to communicate with Sue, though two
or three days earlier they had agreed to mutual severance.
He wrote in the briefest terms:
‘Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost
suddenly. The funeral is on Friday afternoon.’
He remained in and about Marygreen through the
intervening days, went out on Friday morning to see that the
grave was finished, and wondered if Sue would come. She
had not written, and that seemed to signify rather that she
would come than that she would not. Having timed her by
her only possible train, he locked the door about midday,
and crossed the hollow field to the verge of the upland by
the Brown House, where he stood and looked over the vast
prospect northwards, and over the nearer landscape in
which Alfredston stood. Two miles behind it a jet of white
steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.
There was a long time to wait, even now, till he would
know if she had arrived. He did wait, however, and at last a
small hired vehicle pulled up at the bottom of the hill, and a
person alighted, the conveyance going back, while the
passenger began ascending the hill. He knew her; and she
looked so slender to-day that it seemed as if she might be
crushed in the intensity of a too passionate embrace—such
as it was not for him to give. Two-thirds of the way up her
head suddenly took a solicitous poise, and he knew that she
had at that moment recognized him. Her face soon began a
pensive smile, which lasted till, having descended a little
way, he met her.
‘I thought,’ she began with nervous quickness, ‘that it
would be so sad to let you attend the funeral alone!’ And so
—at the last moment—I came.’
‘Dear faithful Sue!’ murmured Jude.
With the elusiveness of her curious double nature,
however, Sue did not stand still for any further greeting,
though it wanted some time to the burial. A pathos so
unusually compounded as that which attached to this hour
was unlikely to repeat itself for years, if ever, and Jude
would have paused, and meditated, and conversed. But Sue
either saw it not at all, or, seeing it more than he, would not
allow herself to feel it.
The sad and simple ceremony was soon over, their
progress to the church being almost at a trot, the bustling
undertaker having a more important funeral an hour later,
three miles off. Drusilla was put into the new ground, quite
away from her ancestors. Sue and Jude had gone side by
side to the grave, and now sat down to tea in the familiar
house; their lives united at least in this last attention to the
dead.
‘She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?’
murmured Sue.
‘Yes. Particularly for members of our family.’
Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.
‘We are rather a sad family, don’t you think, Jude?’
‘She said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we
make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!’
Sue was silent. ‘Is it wrong, Jude,’ she said with a
tentative tremor, ‘for a husband or wife to tell a third person
that they are unhappy in their marriage? If a marriage
ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is
only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in
householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land
and money by children, making it necessary that the male
parent should be known—which it seems to be—why surely
a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that
it hurts and grieves him or her?’
‘I have said so, anyhow, to you.’
Presently she went on: ‘Are there many couples, do you
think, where one dislikes the other for no definite fault?’
‘Yes, I suppose. If either cares for another person, for
instance.’
‘But even apart from that? Wouldn’t the woman, for
example, be very bad-natured if she didn’t like to live with
her husband; merely’—her voice undulated, and he guessed
things—‘merely because she had a personal feeling against
it—a physical objection—a fastidiousness, or whatever it
may be called—although she might respect and be grateful
to him? I am merely putting a case. Ought she to try to
overcome her pruderies?’
Jude threw a troubled look at her. He said, looking away;
‘It would be just one of those cases in which my experiences
go contrary to my dogmas. Speaking as an order-loving man
—which I hope I am, though I fear I am not—I should say,
yes. Speaking from experience and unbiased nature, I
should say, no.… Sue, I believe you are not happy!’
‘Of course I am!’ she contradicted. ‘How can a woman be
unhappy who has only been married eight weeks to a man
she chose freely?’
‘ “Chose freely!” ’
‘Why do you repeat it? … But I have to go back by the six
o’clock train. You will be staying on here, I suppose?’
‘For a few days to wind up aunt’s affairs. This house is
gone now. Shall I go to the train with you?’
A little laugh of objection came from Sue. ‘I think not. You
may come part of the way.’
‘But stop—you can’t go to-night! That train won’t take you
to Shaston. You must stay and go back to-morrow. Mrs. Edlin
has plenty of room, if you don’t like to stay here?’
‘Very well,’ she said dubiously. ‘I didn’t tell him I would
come for certain.’
Jude went to the widow’s house adjoining, to let her know;
and returning in a few minutes sat down again.
‘It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue—horrible!’
he said abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor.
‘No! Why?’
‘I can’t tell you all my part of the gloom. Your part is that
you ought not to have married him. I saw it before you had
done it, but I thought I mustn’t interfere. I was wrong. I
ought to have!’
‘But what makes you assume all this, dear?’
‘Because—I can see you through your feathers, my poor
little bird!’
Her hand lay on the table, and Jude put his upon it. Sue
drew hers away.
‘That’s absurd, Sue,’ cried he, ‘after what we’ve been
talking about! I am more strict and formal than you, if it
comes to that; and that you should object to such an
innocent action shows that you are ridiculously
inconsistent!’
‘Perhaps it was too prudish,’ she said, repentantly. ‘Only I
have fancied it was a sort of trick of ours—too frequent
perhaps. There, you may hold it as much as you like. Is that
good of me?’
‘Yes; very.’
‘But I must tell him.’
‘Who?’
‘Richard.’
‘O—of course, if you think it necessary. But as it means
nothing it may be bothering him needlessly.’
‘Well—are you sure you mean it only as my cousin?’
‘Absolutely sure. I have no feelings of love left in me.’
‘That’s news. How has it come to be?’
‘I’ve seen Arabella.’
She winced at the hit; then said curiously, ‘When did you
see her?’
‘When I was at Christminster.’
‘So she’s come back; and you never told me! I suppose
you will live with her now?’
‘Of course—just as you live with your husband.’
She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and
cactuses, withered for want of attention, and through them
at the outer distance, till her eyes began to grow moist.
‘What is it?’ said Jude, in a softened tone.
‘Why should you be so glad to go back to her if—if—what
you used to say to me is still true—I mean if it were true
then! Of course it is not now! How could your heart go back
to Arabella so soon?’
‘A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way.’
‘Ah—it isn’t true!’ she said with gentle resentment. ‘You
are teasing me—that’s all—because you think I am not
happy!’
‘I don’t know. I don’t wish to know.’
 ‘If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness;
not that I should have a right to dislike him! He is
considerate to me in everything; and he is very interesting,
from the amount of general knowledge he has acquired by
reading everything that comes in his way.… Do you think,
Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his own age, or
one younger than himself—eighteen years—as I am than
he?’
‘It depends upon what they feel for each other.’
He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she
had to go on unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone,
verging on tears:
‘I—I think I must be equally honest with you as you have
been with me. Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to
say?—that though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like
him—it is a torture to me to—live with him as a husband!—
There, now I have let it out—I couldn’t help it, although I
have been—pretending I am happy.—Now you’ll have a
contempt for me for ever, I suppose!’ She bent down her
face upon her hands as they lay upon the cloth, and silently
sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged
table quiver.
‘I have only been married a month or two!’ she went on,
still remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her
hands. ‘And it is said that what a woman shrinks from—in
the early days of her marriage—she shakes down to with
comfortable indifference in half-a-dozen years. But that is
much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no
affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to
the use of a wooden leg or aim in the course of time!’
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, ‘I thought there was
something wrong, Sue! O, I thought there was!’
‘But it is not as you think!—there is nothing wrong except
my own wickedness, I suppose you’d call it—a repugnance
on my part, for a reason I cannot disclose, and what would
not be admitted as one by the world in general! … What
tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to
this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the
dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter
whose essence is its voluntariness! … I wish he would beat
me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could
talk about as a justification for feeling as I do! But he does
nothing, except that he has grown a little cold since he has
found out how I feel. That’s why he didn’t come to the
funeral.… O, I am very miserable—I don’t know what to do!
… Don’t come near me, Jude, because you mustn’t. Don’t—
don’t!’
But he had jumped up and put his face against hers—or
rather against her ear, her face being inaccessible.
‘I told you not to, Jude!’
‘I know you did—I only wish to—console you! It all arose
through my being married before we met, didn’t it? You
would have been my wife, Sue, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t
been for that?’
Instead of replying she rose quickly, and saying she was
going to walk to her aunt’s grave in the churchyard to
recover herself, went out of the house. Jude did not follow
her. Twenty minutes later he saw her cross the village green
towards Mrs. Edlin’s, and soon she sent a little girl to fetch
her bag, and tell him she was too tired to see him again that
night.
In the lonely room of his aunt’s house Jude sat watching
the cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the
night shade. He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls
equally lonely and disheartened; and again questioned his
devotional motto that all was for the best.
He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the
sense that Sue was so near at hand. At some time near two
o’clock, when he was beginning to sleep more soundly, he
was aroused by a shrill squeak that had been familiar
enough to him when he lived regularly at Marygreen. It was
the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin. As was the little
creature’s habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably
would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain
bearing its torture till the morrow, when the trapper would
come and knock it on the head.
He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the
earthworms now began to picture the agonies of the rabbit
from its lacerated leg. If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-
leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till
the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its
flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to
escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification of
the limb. If it were a ‘good catch,’ namely, by the fore-leg,
the bone would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in
attempts at an impossible escape.
Almost half-an-hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its
cry. Jude could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain,
so dressing himself quickly he descended, and by the light
of the moon went across the green in the direction of the
sound. He reached the hedge bordering the widow’s garden,
when he stood still. The faint click of the trap as dragged
about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching
the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with
the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out
of the open casement at a window on the ground floor of the
adjacent cottage. ‘Jude!’ said a voice timidly—Sue’s voice.
‘It is you—is it not?’
‘Yes, dear!’
‘I haven’t been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the
rabbit, and couldn’t help thinking of what it suffered, till I
felt I must come down and kill it! But I am so glad you got
there first.… They ought not to be allowed to set these steel
traps, ought they!’
Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one,
so that she was visible down to her waist. She let go the
casement-stay and put her hand upon his, her moonlit face
regarding him wistfully.
‘Did it keep you awake?’ he said.
‘No—I was awake.’
‘How was that?’
‘O, you know—now! I know you, with your religious
doctrines, think that a married woman in trouble of a kind
like mine commits a mortal sin in making a man the
confidant of it, as I did you. I wish I hadn’t, now!’
‘Don’t wish it, dear,’ he said. ‘That may have been my
view; but my doctrines and I begin to part company.’
‘I knew it—I knew it! And that’s why I vowed I wouldn’t
disturb your beliefs. But—I am so glad to see you!—and, O, I
didn’t mean to see you again, now the last tie between us,
Aunt Drusilla, is dead!’
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. ‘There is a stronger
one left!’ he said. ‘I’ll never care about my doctrines or my
religion any more! Let them go! Let me help you, even if I
do love you, and even if you …’
‘Don’t say it!—I know what you mean; but I can’t admit so
much as that. There! Guess what you like, but don’t press
me to answer questions!’
‘I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!’
‘I can’t be! So few could enter into my feeling—they
would say ’twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of
that sort, and condemn me.… It is none of the natural
tragedies of love that’s love’s usual tragedy in civilized life,
but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a
natural state would find relief in parting! … It would have
been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I
had been able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody.
And I must tell somebody! Jude, before I married him I had
never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I
knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no excuse. I was old
enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed
on, when I had got into that Training School scrape, with all
the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! … I am certain one
ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so
ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they
submit, and I kick.… When people of a later age look back
upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times
that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!’
‘You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish—I wish—’
‘You must go in now!’
In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid
her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a
scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head,
withdrawing quickly, so that he could not put his arms round
her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have done. She
shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.

IV–3
Sue’s distressful confession recurred to Jude’s mind all the
night as being a sorrow indeed.
The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the
neighbours saw her companion and herself disappearing on
foot down the hill path which led into the lonely road to
Alfredston. An hour passed before he returned along the
same route, and in his face there was a look of exaltation
not unmixed with recklessness. An incident had occurred.
They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their
tense and passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries
of each other on how far their intimacy ought to go; till they
had almost quarrelled, and she had said tearfully that it was
hardly proper of him as a parson in embryo to think of such
a thing as kissing her even in farewell, as he now wished to
do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss would
be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it. If given in
the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in
the spirit of a lover she could not permit it. ‘Will you swear
that it will not be in that spirit?’ she had said.
 No: he would not. And then they had turned from each
other in estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a
distance of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round
simultaneously. That look behind was fatal to the reserve
hitherto more or less maintained. They had quickly run
back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly,
kissed close and long. When they parted for good it was
with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.
The kiss was a turning-point in Jude’s career. Back again
in the cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that
though his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest
moment of his faultful life, as long as he nourished this
unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly inconsistent for him
to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and servant of a
religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best a
frailty, and at its worst damnation. What Sue had said in
warmth was really the cold truth. When to defend his
affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in
impassioned attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was
condemned ipso facto13 as a professor of the accepted
school of morals. He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as
he had been by social position, to fill the part of a
propounder of accredited dogma.
Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical
proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his
second aspiration—towards apostleship—had also been
checked by a woman. ‘Is it,’ he said, ‘that the women are to
blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which
the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic
gins and springes14 to noose and hold back those who want
to progress?’
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet,
however humble, to his struggling fellow-creatures, without
any thought of personal gain. Yet with a wife living away
from him with another husband, and himself in love
erratically, the loved one’s revolt against her state being
possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely
respectable according to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to
confront the obvious, which was that he had made himself
quite an impostor as a law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a
shallow hole, to which he brought out all the theological and
ethical works that he possessed, and had stored here. He
knew that, in this country of true believers, most of them
were not saleable at a much higher price than waste-paper
value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way, even
if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus
destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin
with, he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and
with a three-pronged fork shook them over the flames. They
kindled, and lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty,
and his own face, till they were more or less consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing
cottagers talked to him over the garden hedge.
‘Burning up your awld aunt’s rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a
lot gets heaped up in nooks and corners when you’ve lived
eighty years in one house.’
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning before the
leaves, covers, and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler,
Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman15 and the rest had gone
to ashes; but the night was quiet, and as he turned and
turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being no
longer a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which
gave him calm. He might go on believing as before, but he
professed nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited
engines of faith which, as their proprietor, he might
naturally be supposed to exercise on himself first of all. In
his passion for Sue he could now stand as an ordinary
sinner, and not as a whited sepulchre.16
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day,
had gone along to the station, with tears in her eyes for
having run back and let him kiss her. Jude ought not to have
pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way
to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly. She
was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue’s logic was
extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that
before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that
being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things
which were right in theory were wrong in practice.
‘I have been too weak, I think!’ she jerked out as she
pranced on, shaking down tear-drops now and then. ‘It was
burning, like a lover’s—O it was! And I won’t write to him
any more, or at least for a long time, to impress him with
my dignity! And I hope it will hurt him very much—expecting
a letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and the next, and
no letter coming. He’ll suffer then with suspense—won’t he,
that’s all!—and I am very glad of it!’—Tears of pity for Jude’s
approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those
which had surged up in pity for herself.
Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was
disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl,
quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfill the
conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson,
possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and
panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and
worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that
she was troubled, thought it must be owing to the
depressing effect of her aunt’s death and funeral. He began
telling her of his day’s doings, and how his friend
Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he had not
seen for years, had called upon him. While ascending to the
town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said
suddenly and with an air of self chastisement, regarding the
white road and its bordering bushes of hazel:
‘Richard—I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while. I
don’t know whether you think it wrong?’
 He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different
mould, said vaguely, ‘O, did you? What did you do that for?’
‘I don’t know. He wanted to, and I let him.’
‘I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a
novelty.’
They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court
of an omniscient judge he might have entered on his notes
the curious fact that Sue had placed the minor for the major
indiscretion, and had not said a word about the kiss.
After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school
registers. She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and
restless condition, and at last, saying she was tired, went to
bed early. When Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the
drudgery of the attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to
twelve o’clock. Entering their chamber, which by day
commanded a view of some thirty or forty miles over the
Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went to
the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed
with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness
which now covered the far-reaching scene. He was musing.
‘I think,’ he said at last, without turning his head, ‘that I
must get the Committee to change the school-stationer. All
the copybooks are sent wrong this time.’
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:
‘And there must be a re-arrangement of that ventilator in
the classroom. The wind blows down upon my head
unmercifully, and gives me the earache.’
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he
turned around. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot which
extended over the walls upstairs and down in the
dilapidated ‘Old-Grove Place,’ and the massive chimney-
piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the
new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch
furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming
to nod to each other across three centuries upon the
shaking floor.
 ‘Soo!’ he said (this being the way in which he pronounced
her name).
She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been
there—the clothes on her side being flung back. Thinking
she might have forgotten some kitchen detail and gone
downstairs for a moment to see to it, he pulled off his coat
and idled quietly enough for a few minutes, when, finding
she did not come he went out upon the landing, candle in
hand, and said again ‘Soo!’
‘Yes!’ came back to him in her voice, from the distant
kitchen quarter.
‘What are you doing down there at midnight—tiring
yourself out for nothing!’
‘I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire
here.’
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. She
was not there, even now. Lighting a candle he hastily
stepped out upon the landing, and again called her name.
She answered ‘Yes!’ as before; but the tones were small
and confined, and whence they came he could not at first
understand. Under the staircase was a large clothes-closet,
without a window; they seemed to come from it. The door
was shut, but there was no lock or other fastening.
Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she had
suddenly become deranged.
‘What are you doing in there?’ he asked
‘Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late.’
‘But there’s no bed, is there? And no ventilation! Why,
you’ll be suffocated if you stay all night!’
‘O no, I think not. Don’t trouble about me.’
‘But—’ Phillotson seized the knob and pulled at the door.
She had fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke
at his pull. There being no bedstead she had flung down
some rugs and made a little nest for herself in the very
cramped quarters the closet afforded.
 When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair,
great-eyed and trembling.
‘You ought not to have pulled open the door!’ she cried
excitedly. ‘It is not becoming in you! O, will you go away;
please will you!’
She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white night-gown
against the shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried.
She continued to beseech him not to disturb her.
He said: ‘I’ve been kind to you, and given you every
liberty; and it is monstrous that you should feel in this way!’
‘Yes,’ said she, weeping. ‘I know that! It is wrong and
wicked of me, I suppose! I am very sorry. But it is not I
altogether that am to blame!’
‘Who is then? Am I?’
‘No—I don’t know! The universe, I suppose—things in
general, because they are so horrid and cruel!’
‘Well, it is no use talking like that. Making a man’s house
so unseemly at this time o’ night! Eliza will hear, if we don’t
mind.’17 (He meant the servant.) ‘Just think if either of the
parsons in this town was to see us now! I hate such
eccentricities, Sue. There’s no order or regularity in your
sentiments! … But I won’t intrude on you further; only I
would advise you not to shut the door too tight, or I shall
find you stifled to-morrow.’
On rising the next morning he immediately looked into
the closet, but Sue had already gone downstairs. There was
a little nest where she had lain, and spiders’ webs hung
overhead. ‘What must a woman’s aversion be when it is
stronger than her fear of spiders!’ he said bitterly.
He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal
began almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the
pavement—or rather roadway, pavements being scarce here
—which was two or three feet above the level of the parlour
floor. They nodded down to the happy couple their morning
greetings, as they went on.
 ‘Richard,’ she said all at once; ‘would you mind my living
away from you?’
‘Away from me? Why, that’s what you were doing when I
married you. What then was the meaning of marrying at
all?’
‘You wouldn’t like me any the better for telling you.’
‘I don’t object to know.’
‘Because I thought I could do nothing else. You had got
my promise a long time before that, remember. Then, as
time went on, I regretted I had promised you, and was trying
to see an honourable way to break it off. But as I couldn’t I
became rather reckless and careless about the conventions.
Then you know what scandals were spread, and how I was
turned out of the Training School you had taken such time
and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and this
frightened me, and it seemed then that the one thing I could
do would be to let the engagement stand. Of course I, of all
people, ought not to have cared what was said, for it was
just what I fancied I never did care for. But I was a coward—
as so many women are—and my theoretic unconventionality
broke down. If that had not entered into the case it would
have been better to have hurt your feelings once for all
then, than to marry you and hurt them all my life after.…
And you were so generous in never giving credit for a
moment to the rumour.’
‘I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its
probability, and inquired of your cousin about it.’
‘Ah!’ she said with pained surprise.
‘I didn’t doubt you.’
‘But you inquired!’
‘I took his word.’
Her eyes had filled. ‘He wouldn’t have inquired!’ she said.
‘But you haven’t answered me. Will you let me go away? I
know how irregular it is of me to ask it—’
‘It is irregular.’
 ‘But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according
to temperaments, which should be classified. If people are
at all peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very
rules that produce comfort in others! … Will you let me?’
‘But we married—’
‘What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances,’ she
burst out, ‘if they make you miserable when you know you
are committing no sin?’
‘But you are committing a sin in not liking me.’
‘I do like you! But I didn’t reflect it would be—that it would
be so much more than that.… For a man and woman to live
on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any
circumstances, however legal. There—I’ve said it! … Will you
let me, Richard?’
‘You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!’
‘Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the
compact, and surely we can cancel it—not legally, of course;
but we can morally, especially as no new interests, in the
shape of children, have arisen to be looked after. Then we
might be friends, and meet without pain to either. O
Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall both be dead
in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that
you relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay
you think me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something
absurd. Well—why should I suffer for what I was born to be,
if it doesn’t hurt other people?’
‘But it does—it hurts me! And you vowed to love me.’
‘Yes—that’s it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as
culpable to bind yourself to love always as to believe a
creed always, and as silly as to vow always to like a
particular food or drink!’
‘And do you mean, by living away from me, living by
yourself?’
‘Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude.’
‘As his wife?’
‘As I choose.’
 Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: ‘She, or he, “who lets the world, or his
own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need
of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” J. S.
Mill’s words, those are.18 I have been reading it up. Why
can’t you act upon them? I wish to, always.’
‘What do I care about J. S. Mill!’ moaned he. ‘I only want
to lead a quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have
guessed what never once occurred to me before our
marriage—that you were in love, and are in love, with Jude
Fawley!’
‘You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun.
But do you suppose that if I had been I should have asked
you to let me go and live with him?’
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the
necessity of replying at present to what apparently did not
strike him as being such a convincing argumentum ad
verecundiam19 as she, in her loss of courage at the last
moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to be so
puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with
her other little peculiarities the extremest request which a
wife could make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue
entering the class-room, where he could see the back of her
head through the glass partition whenever he turned his
eyes that way. As he went on giving and hearing lessons his
forehead and eyebrows twitched from concentrated
agitation of thought; till at length he tore a scrap from a
sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:
‘Your request prevents my attending to work at all. I
don’t know what I am doing! Was it seriously made?’
He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a
little boy to take to Sue. The child toddled off into the class-
room. Phillotson saw his wife turn and take the note, and the
bend of her pretty head as she read it, her lips slightly
crisped, to prevent undue expression under fire of so many
young eyes. He could not see her hands, but she changed
her position, and soon the child returned, bringing nothing
in reply. In a few minutes, however, one of Sue’s class
appeared, with a little note similar to his own. These words
only were pencilled therein:
‘I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously
made.’
Phillotson looked more disturbed than before, and the
meeting-place of his brows twitched again. In ten minutes
he called up the child he had just sent to her, and
despatched another missive:
‘God knows I don’t want to thwart you in any
reasonable way. My whole thought is to make you
comfortable and happy. But I cannot agree to such a
preposterous notion as your going to live with your
lover. You would lose everybody’s respect and regard;
and so should I!’
After an interval a similar part was enacted in the class-
room, and an answer came:
‘I know you mean my good. But I don’t want to be
respectable! To produce “Human development in its
richest diversity” (to quote your Humboldt)20 is to my
mind far above respectability. No doubt my tastes are
low—in your view—hopelessly low! If you won’t let me
go to him, will you grant me this one request—allow me
to live in your house in a separate way?’
To this he returned no answer.
She wrote again:
‘I know what you think. But cannot you have pity on
me? I beg you to; I implore you to be merciful! I would
not ask if I were not almost compelled by what I can’t
bear! No poor woman has ever wished more than I that
 Eve had not fallen, so that (as the primitive Christians
believed) some harmless mode of vegetation might
have peopled Paradise. But I won’t trifle! Be kind to me
—even though I have not been kind to you! I will go
away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.’
Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:
‘I do not wish to pain you. How well you know I don’t!
Give me a little time. I am disposed to agree to your
last request.’
One line from her:
‘Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve
your kindness.’
All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through
the glazed partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had
not known her.
But he was as good as his word, and consented to her
living apart in the house. At first, when they met at meals,
she had seemed more composed under the new
arrangement; but the irksomeness of their position worked
on her temperament, and the fibres of her nature seemed
strained like harp-strings. She talked vaguely and
indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.

IV–4
Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom,
trying to get together the materials for his long-neglected
hobby of Roman antiquities. For the first time since reviving
the subject he felt a return of his old interest in it. He forgot
time and place, and when he remembered himself and
ascended to rest it was nearly two o’clock.
His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on
the other side of the house, he mechanically went to the
room that he and his wife had occupied when he first
became a tenant of Old-Grove Place, which since his
differences with Sue had been hers exclusively. He entered,
and unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement.
Before the schoolmaster had realized where he was he
perceived Sue starting up half-awake, staring wildly, and
springing out upon the floor on the side away from him,
which was towards the window. This was somewhat hidden
by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard
her flinging up the sash. Before he had thought that she
meant to do more than get air she had mounted upon the
sill and leapt out. She disappeared in the darkness, and he
heard her fall below.
Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself
sharply against the newel21 in his haste. Opening the heavy
door he ascended the two or three steps to the level of the
ground, and there on the gravel before him lay a white
heap. Phillotson seized it in his arms, and bringing Sue into
the hall seated her on a chair, where he gazed at her by the
flapping light of the candle which he had set down in the
draught on the bottom stair.
She had certainly not broken her neck. She looked at him
with eyes that seemed not to take him in; and though not
particularly large in general they appeared so now. She
pressed her side and rubbed her arm, as if conscious of
pain; then stood up, averting her face, in evident distress at
his gaze.
‘Thank God—you are not killed! Though it’s not for want
of trying—not much hurt I hope?’
Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably
owing to the lowness of the old rooms and to the high level
of the ground without. Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow
in the side she had apparently incurred little harm.
‘I was asleep, I think!’ she began, her pale face still
turned away from him. ‘And something frightened me—a
terrible dream—I thought I saw you—’ The actual
circumstances seemed to come back to her, and she was
silent.
Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the
wretched Phillotson flung it round her. ‘Shall I help you
upstairs?’ he asked drearily; for the significance of all this
sickened him of himself and of everything.
‘No thank you, Richard. I am very little hurt. I can walk.’
‘You ought to lock your door,’ he mechanically said, as if
lecturing in school. ‘Then no one could intrude even by
accident.’
‘I have tried—it won’t lock. All the doors are out of order.’
The aspect of things was not improved by her admission.
She ascended the staircase slowly, the waving light of the
candle shining on her. Phillotson did not approach her, or
attempt to ascend himself till he heard her enter her room.
Then he fastened up the front door, and returning sat down
on the lower stairs, holding the newel with one hand, and
bowing his face into the other. Thus he remained for a long
time—a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him;
till, raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say
that the business of his life must be carried on, whether he
had a wife or no, he took the candle and went upstairs to his
lonely room on the other side of the landing.
No further incident touching the matter between them
occurred till the following evening, when, immediately
school was over, Phillotson walked out of Shaston, saying he
required no tea, and not informing Sue where he was going.
He descended from the town level by a steep road in a
north-westerly direction, and continued to move downwards
till the soil changed from its white dryness to a tough brown
clay. He was now on the low alluvial beds
‘Where Duncliffe is the traveller’s mark,
And cloty Stour’s a-rolling dark’
More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity
of evening. Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible.
 ‘On the grey-topp’d height
Of Paladore, as pale day wore
Away …’22
The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine
as if watching him, one of which windows was his own.
Above it he could just discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity
Church. The air down here, tempered by the thick damp bed
of tenacious clay, was not as it had been above, but soft and
relaxing, so that when he had walked a mile or two he was
obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.
Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without
hesitation through the shade, as a man goes on, night or
day, in a district over which he has played as a boy. He had
walked altogether about four and a half miles
‘Where Stour receives her strength,
From six cleere fountains fey,’23
when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached
Leddenton—a little town of three or four thousand
inhabitants—where he went on to the boys’ school, and
knocked at the door of the master’s residence.
A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson’s inquiry
if Mr. Gillingham was at home replied that he was, going at
once off to his own house, and leaving Phillotson to find his
way in as he could. He discovered his friend putting away
some books from which he had been giving evening lessons.
The light of the paraffin lamp fell on Phillotson’s face—pale
and wretched by contrast with his friend’s, who had a cool,
practical look. They had been schoolmates in boyhood, and
fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many
years before this time.
‘Glad to see you, Dick! But you don’t look well? Nothing
the matter?’
Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham
closed the cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.
 ‘Why you haven’t been here—let me see—since you were
married? I called, you know, but you were out; and upon my
word it is such a climb after dark that I have been waiting till
the days are longer before lumpering24 up again. I am glad
you didn’t wait, however.’
Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they
occasionally used a dialect-word of their boyhood to each
other in private.
‘I’ve come, George, to explain to you my reasons to
taking a step that I am about to take, so that you, at least,
will understand my motives if other people question them
anywhen—as they may, indeed certainly will.… But anything
is better than the present condition of things. God forbid
that you should ever have such an experience as mine!’
‘Sit down. You don’t mean—anything wrong between you
and Mrs. Phillotson?’
‘I do.… My wretched state is that I’ve a wife I love, who
not only does not love me, but—but—Well, I won’t say. I
know her feeling! I should prefer hatred from her!’
‘Ssh!’
‘And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame
as I. She was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I
took advantage of her inexperience, and toled25 her out for
walks, and got her to agree to a long engagement before
she well knew her own mind. Afterwards she saw somebody
else, but she blindly fulfilled her engagement.’
‘Loving the other?’
‘Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly; though
her exact feeling for him is a riddle to me—and to him too, I
think—possibly to herself. She is one of the oddest creatures
I ever met. However, I have been struck with these two
facts; the extraordinary sympathy, or similarity, between
the pair. He is her cousin, which perhaps accounts for some
of it. They seem to be one person split in two! And with her
unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband, even
though she may like me as a friend, ’tis too much to bear
longer. She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to
no purpose. I cannot bear it—I cannot! I can’t answer her
arguments—she has read ten times as much as I. Her
intellect sparkles like diamonds, while mine smoulders like
brown paper.… She’s one too many for me!’
‘She’ll get over it, good-now?’26
‘Never! It is—but I won’t go into it—there are reasons why
she never will. At last she calmly and firmly asked if she
might leave me and go to him. The climax came last night,
when, owing to my entering her room by accident, she
jumped out of window—so strong was her dread of me! She
pretended it was a dream, but that was to soothe me. Now
when a woman jumps out of window without caring whether
she breaks her neck or no, she’s not to be mistaken; and
this being the case I have come to a conclusion: that it is
wrong to so torture a fellow-creature any longer; and I won’t
be the inhuman wretch to do it, cost what it may!’
‘What—you’ll let her go? And with her lover?’
‘Whom with is her matter. I shall let her go; with him
certainly, if she wishes. I know I may be wrong—I know I
can’t logically, or religiously, defend my concession to such
a wish of hers; or harmonize it with the doctrines I was
brought up in. Only I know one thing: something within me
tells me I am doing wrong in refusing her. I, like other men,
profess to hold that if a husband gets such a so-called
preposterous request from his wife, the only course that can
possibly be regarded as right and proper and honourable in
him is to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and
key, and murder her lover perhaps. But is that essentially
right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly
mean and selfish? I don’t profess to decide. I simply am
going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of
themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a
quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible.’
‘But—you see, there’s the question of neighbours and
society—what will happen if everybody—’
 ‘O, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer! I only
see what’s under my eyes.’
‘Well—I don’t agree with your instinct, Dick!’ said
Gillingham gravely. ‘I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that
such a sedate, plodding fellow as you should have
entertained such a craze for a moment. You said when I
called that she was puzzling and peculiar: I think you are!’
‘Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to
be intrinsically a good woman, while she has pleaded for
release—been the man she has knelt to and implored
indulgence of?’
‘I am thankful to say I haven’t.’
‘Then I don’t think you are in a position to give an opinion.
I have been that man, and it makes all the difference in the
world, if one has any manliness or chivalry in him. I had not
the remotest idea—living apart from women as I have done
for so many years—that merely taking a woman to church
and putting a ring upon her finger could by any possibility
involve one in such a daily, continuous tragedy as that now
shared by her and me!’
‘Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you,
provided she kept to herself. But to go attended by a
cavalier—that makes a difference.’
‘Not a bit. Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure
her present misery than be made to promise to keep apart
from him? All that is a question for herself. It is not the same
thing at all as the treachery of living on with a husband and
playing him false.… However, she has not distinctly implied
living with him as wife, though I think she means to.… And
to the best of my understanding it is not an ignoble, merely
animal, feeling between the two: that is the worst of it;
because it makes me think their affection will be enduring. I
did not mean to confess to you that in the first jealous
weeks of my marriage, before I had come to my right mind, I
hid myself in the school one evening when they were
together there, and I heard what they said. I am ashamed of
it now, though I suppose I was only exercising a legal right. I
found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or
sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow
took away all flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is
to be together—to share each other’s emotions, and fancies,
and dreams.’
‘Platonic!’
‘Well no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it. They remind me
of—what are their names—Laon and Cythna.27 Also of Paul
and Virginia28 a little. The more I reflect, the more entirely I
am on their side!’
‘But if people did as you want to do, there’d be a general
domestic disintegration. The family would no longer be the
social unit.’
‘Yes—I am all abroad, I suppose!’ said Phillotson sadly. ‘I
was never a very bright reasoner, you remember.… And yet,
I don’t see why the woman and the children should not be
the unit without the man.’
‘By the Lord Harry!—Matriarchy! … Does she say all this
too?’
‘O no. She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this—all in
the last twelve hours!’
‘It will upset all received opinion hereabout. Good God—
what will Shaston say!’
‘I don’t say that it won’t. I don’t know—I don’t know! … As
I say, I am only a feeler, not a reasoner.’
‘Now,’ said Gillingham, ‘let us take it quietly, and have
something to drink over it.’ He went under the stairs, and
produced a bottle of cider-wine, of which they drank a
rummer29 each. ‘I think you are rafted,30 and not yourself,’
he continued. ‘Do go back and make up your mind to put up
with a few whims. But keep her. I hear on all sides that she’s
a charming young thing.’
‘Ah yes! That’s the bitterness of it! Well, I won’t stay. I
have a long walk before me.’
 Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and
at parting expressed his hope that this consultation, singular
as its subject was, would be the renewal of their old
comradeship. ‘Stick to her!’ were his last words, flung into
the darkness after Phillotson; from which his friend
answered ‘Ay, ay!’
But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night,
and no sound was audible but that of the purling tributaries
of the Stour, he said, ‘So Gillingham, my friend, you had no
stronger arguments against it than those!’
‘I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her
senses—that’s what I think!’ murmured Gillingham, as he
walked back alone.
The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told
Sue:
‘You may go—with whom you will. I absolutely and
unconditionally agree.’
Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to
Phillotson more and more indubitably the true one. His mild
serenity at the sense that he was doing his duty by a
woman who was at his mercy almost overpowered his grief
at relinquishing her.
Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal
together had come—a cloudy evening with wind—which
indeed was very seldom absent in this elevated place. How
permanently it was imprinted upon his vision; that look of
her as she glided into the parlour to tea; a slim flexible
figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and marked by
the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic
possibilities quite at variance with her times of buoyancy; a
trying of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either.
Her nervous manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be
injured by her course, might have been interpreted by a
stranger as displeasure that Phillotson intruded his presence
on her for the few brief minutes that remained.
 ‘You had better have a slice of ham, or an egg, or
something with your tea? You can’t travel on a mouthful of
bread and butter.’
She took the slice he helped her to; and they discussed as
they sat trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he
would find the key of this or that cupboard, what little bills
were paid, and what not.
‘I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue,’ he said, in
a heroic attempt to put her at her ease. ‘So that being
without a wife will not really be irksome to me, as it might
be to other men who have had one a little while. I have, too,
this grand hobby in my head of writing “The Roman
Antiquities of Wessex,” which will occupy all my spare
hours.’
‘If you will send me some of the manuscript to copy at
any time, as you used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!’
she said with amenable gentleness. ‘I should much like to be
some help to you still—as a—friend.’
Phillotson mused, and said: ‘No, I think we ought to be
really separate, if we are to be at all. And for this reason,
that I don’t wish to ask you any questions, and particularly
wish you not to give me information as to your movements,
or even your address.… Now, what money do you want? You
must have some, you know.’
‘O, of course, Richard, I couldn’t think of having any of
your money to go away from you with! I don’t want any
either. I have enough of my own to last me for a long while,
and Jude will let me have—’
‘I would rather not know anything about him, if you don’t
mind. You are free, absolutely; and your course is your own.’
‘Very well. But I’ll just say that I have packed only a
change or two of my own personal clothing, and one or two
little things besides that are my very own. I wish you would
look into my trunk before it is closed. Besides that I have
only a small parcel that will go into Jude’s portmanteau.’
 ‘Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your
luggage! I wish you would take three-quarters of the
household furniture. I don’t want to be bothered with it. I
have a sort of affection for a little of it that belonged to my
poor mother and father. But the rest you are welcome to
whenever you like to send for it.’
‘That I shall never do.’
‘You go by the six-thirty train, don’t you? It is now a
quarter to six.’
‘You … You don’t seem very sorry I am going, Richard!’
‘O no—perhaps not.’
‘I like you much for how you have behaved. It is a curious
thing that directly I have begun to regard you as not my
husband, but as my old teacher, I like you. I won’t be so
affected as to say I love you, because you know I don’t,
except as a friend. But you do seem that to me!’
Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these
reflections, and then the station omnibus came round to
take her up. Phillotson saw her things put on the top,
handed her in, and was obliged to make an appearance of
kissing her as he wished her good-bye, which she quite
understood and imitated. From the cheerful manner in which
they parted the omnibus-man had no other idea than that
she was going for a short visit.
When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs
and opened the window in the direction the omnibus had
taken. Soon the noise of its wheels died away. He came
down then, his face compressed like that of one bearing
pain; he put on his hat and went out, following by the same
route for nearly a mile. Suddenly turning round he came
home.
He had no sooner entered than the voice of his friend
Gillingham greeted him from the front room.
‘I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I
walked in, and made myself comfortable. I said I would call,
you remember.’
 ‘Yes. I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly
for coming to-night.’
‘How is Mrs.____’
‘She is quite well. She is gone—just gone. That’s her tea-
cup, that she drank out of only an hour ago. And that’s the
plate she—’ Phillotson’s throat got choked up, and he could
not go on. He turned and pushed the tea-things aside.
‘Have you had any tea, by-the-bye?’ he asked presently in
a renewed voice.
‘No—yes—never mind,’ said Gillingham, preoccupied.
‘Gone, you say she is!’
‘Yes.… I would have died for her; but I wouldn’t be cruel to
her in the name of the law. She is, as I understand, gone to
join her lover. What they are going to do I cannot say.
Whatever it may be she has my full consent to.’
There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson’s
pronouncement which restrained his friend’s comment.
‘Shall I—leave you?’ he asked.
‘No, no. It is a mercy to me that you have come. I have
some articles to arrange and clear away. Would you help
me?’
Gillingham assented; and having gone to the upper rooms
the schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all
Sue’s things that she had left behind, and laying them in a
large box. ‘She wouldn’t take all I wanted her to,’ he
continued. ‘But when I made up my mind to her going to live
in her own way I did make up my mind.’
‘Some men would have stopped at an agreement to
separate.’
‘I’ve gone into all that, and don’t wish to argue it. I was,
and am, the most old-fashioned man in the world on the
question of marriage—in fact I had never thought critically
about its ethics at all. But certain facts stared me in the
face, and I couldn’t go against them.’
 They went on with the packing silently. When it was done
Phillotson closed the box and turned the key.
‘There,’ he said. ‘To adorn her in somebody’s eyes; never
again in mine!’

IV–5
Four-and-twenty hours before this time Sue had written the
following note to Jude:
‘It is as I told you; and I am leaving to-morrow
evening. Richard and I thought it could be done with
less obtrusiveness after dark. I feel rather frightened,
and therefore ask you to be sure you are on the
Melchester platform to meet me. I arrive at a little to
seven. I know you will, of course, dear Jude; but I feel
so timid that I can’t help begging you to be punctual.
He has been so very kind to me through it all!
‘Now to our meeting! S.’
As she was carried by the omnibus further and further
down from the mountain town—the single passenger that
evening—she regarded the receding road with a sad face.
But no hesitation was apparent therein.
The up-train by which she was departing stopped by
signal only. To Sue it seemed strange that such a powerful
organization as a railway-train should be brought to a
standstill on purpose for her—a fugitive from her lawful
home.
The twenty minutes’ journey drew towards its close, and
Sue began gathering her things together to alight. At the
moment that the train came to a standstill by the
Melchester platform a hand was laid on the door and she
beheld Jude. He entered the compartment promptly. He had
a black bag in his hand, and was dressed in the dark suit he
wore on Sundays and in the evening after work. Altogether
he looked a very handsome young fellow, his ardent
affection for her burning in his eyes.
‘O Jude!’ She clasped his hand with both hers, and her
tense state caused her to simmer over in a little succession
of dry sobs. ‘I—I am so glad! I get out here?’
‘No. I get in, dear one! I’ve packed. Besides this bag I’ve
only a big box which is labelled.’
‘But don’t I get out? Aren’t we going to stay here?’
‘We couldn’t possibly, don’t you see. We are known here—
I, at any rate, am well known. I’ve booked for Aldbrickham;
and here’s your ticket for the same place, as you have only
one to here.’
‘I thought we should have stayed here,’ she repeated.
‘It wouldn’t have done at all.’
‘Ah!—Perhaps not.’
‘There wasn’t time for me to write and say the place I had
decided on. Aldbrickham is a much bigger town—sixty or
seventy thousand inhabitants—and nobody knows anything
about us there.’
‘And you have given up your Cathedral work here?’
‘Yes. It was rather sudden—your message coming
unexpectedly. Strictly, I might have been made to finish out
the week. But I pleaded urgency and I was let off. I would
have deserted any day at your command, dear Sue. I have
deserted more than that for you!’
‘I fear I am doing you a lot of harm. Ruining your
prospects of the Church; ruining your progress in your trade;
everything!’
‘The Church is no more to me. Let it lie! I am not to be
one of
“The soldier-saints who, row on row,
Burn upward each to his point of bliss,”31
if any such there be! My point of bliss is not upward, but
here.’
 ‘O I seem so bad—upsetting men’s courses like this!’ said
she, taking up in her voice the emotion that had begun in
his. But she recovered her equanimity by the time they had
travelled a dozen miles.
‘He has been so good in letting me go,’ she resumed.
‘And here’s a note I found on my dressing-table, addressed
to you.’
‘Yes. He’s not an unworthy fellow,’ said Jude, glancing at
the note. ‘And I am ashamed of myself for hating him
because he married you.’
‘According to the rule of women’s whims I suppose I
ought to suddenly love him, because he has let me go so
generously and unexpectedly,’ she answered smiling. ‘But I
am so cold, or devoid of gratitude, or so something, that
even this generosity hasn’t made me love him, or repent, or
want to stay with him as his wife; although I do feel I like his
large-mindedness, and respect him more than ever.’
‘It may not work so well for us as if he had been less kind,
and you had run away against his will,’ murmured Jude.
‘That I never would have done.’
Jude’s eyes rested musingly on her face. Then he
suddenly kissed her; and was going to kiss her again. ‘No—
only once now—please, Jude!’
‘That’s rather cruel,’ he answered; but acquiesced. ‘Such
a strange thing has happened to me,’ Jude continued after a
silence. ‘Arabella has actually written to ask me to get a
divorce from her—in kindness to her, she says. She wants to
honestly and legally marry that man she has already
married virtually; and begs me to enable her to do it.’
‘What have you done?’
‘I have agreed. I thought at first I couldn’t do it without
getting her into trouble about that second marriage, and I
don’t want to injure her in any way. Perhaps she’s no worse
than I am, after all! But nobody knows about it over here,
and I find it will not be a difficult proceeding at all. If she
wants to start afresh I have only too obvious reasons for not
hindering her.’
‘Then you’ll be free?’
‘Yes, I shall be free.’
‘Where are we booked for?’ she asked, with the
discontinuity that marked her to-night.
‘Aldbrickham, as I said.’
‘But it will be very late when we get there?’
‘Yes. I thought of that, and I wired for a room for us at the
Temperance Hotel there.’
‘One?’
‘Yes—one.’
She looked at him. ‘O Jude!’ Sue bent her forehead
against the corner of the compartment. ‘I thought you might
do it; and that I was deceiving you. But I didn’t mean that!’
In the pause which followed, Jude’s eyes fixed themselves
with a stultified expression on the opposite seat. ‘Well!’ he
said.… ‘Well!’
He remained in silence; and seeing how discomfited he
was she put her face against his cheek, murmuring, ‘Don’t
be vexed, dear!’
‘Oh—there’s no harm done,’ he said. ‘But—I understood it
like that.… Is this a sudden change of mind?’
‘You have no right to ask me such a question; and I shan’t
answer!’ she said, smiling.
‘My dear one, your happiness is more to me than
anything—although we seem to verge on quarrelling so
often!—and your will is law to me. I am something more
than a mere—selfish fellow, I hope. Have it as you wish!’ On
reflection his brow showed perplexity. ‘But perhaps it is that
you don’t love me—not that you have become conventional!
Much as, under your teaching, I hate convention, I hope it is
that, not the other terrible alternative!’
Even at this obvious moment for candour Sue could not
be quite candid as to the state of that mystery, her heart.
‘Put it down to my timidity,’ she said with hurried
evasiveness; ‘to a woman’s natural timidity when the crisis
comes. I may feel as well as you that I have a perfect right
to live with you as you thought—from this moment. I may
hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father
of a woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers
as the cut of her under-linen, on whom nobody will have any
right to question her. But partly, perhaps, because it is by
his generosity that I am now free, I would rather not be
other than a little rigid. If there had been a rope-ladder, and
he had run after us with pistols, it would have seemed
different, and I may have acted otherwise. But don’t press
me and criticize me, Jude! Assume that I haven’t the
courage of my opinions. I know I am a poor miserable
creature. My nature is not so passionate as yours!’
He repeated simply: ‘I thought—what I naturally thought.
But if we are not lovers, we are not. Phillotson thought so, I
am sure. See, here is what he has written to me.’ He opened
the letter she had brought, and read:
‘I make only one condition—that you are tender and kind
to her. I know you love her. But even love may be cruel at
times. You are made for each other: it is obvious, palpable,
to any unbiased older person. You were all along “the
shadowy third”32 in my short life with her. I repeat, take care
of Sue.’
‘He’s a good fellow, isn’t he!’ she said with latent tears.
On reconsideration she added, ‘He was very resigned to
letting me go—too resigned almost! I never was so near
being in love with him as when he made such thoughtful
arrangements for my being comfortable on my journey, and
offering to provide money. Yet I was not. If I loved him ever
so little as a wife, I’d go back to him even now.’
‘But you don’t, do you?’
‘It is true—O so terribly true!—I don’t.’
‘Nor me neither, I half fear!’ he said pettishly. ‘Nor
anybody perhaps!—Sue, sometimes, when I am vexed with
you, I think you are incapable of real love.’
 ‘That’s not good and loyal of you!’ she said, and drawing
away from him as far as she could, looked severely out into
the darkness. She added in hurt tones, without turning
round: ‘My liking for you is not as some women’s perhaps.
But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely delicate
kind, and I don’t want to go further and risk it by—an
attempt to intensify it! I quite realized that, as woman with
man, it was a risk to come. But, as me with you, I resolved
to trust you to set my wishes above your gratification. Don’t
discuss it further, dear Jude!’
‘Of course, if it would make you reproach yourself … but
you do like me very much, Sue? say you do! Say that you do
a quarter, a tenth, as much as I do you; and I’ll be content!’
‘I’ve let you kiss me, and that tells enough.’
‘Just once or so!’
‘Well—don’t be a greedy boy.’
He leant back, and did not look at her for a long time.
That episode in her past history of which she had told him—
of the poor Christminster graduate whom she had handled
thus, returned to Jude’s mind; and he saw himself as a
possible second in such a torturing destiny.
‘This is a queer elopement!’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps you
are making a cat’s-paw of me with Phillotson all this time.
Upon my word it almost seems so—to see you sitting up
there so prim!’
‘Now you mustn’t be angry—I won’t let you!’ she coaxed,
turning and moving nearer to him. ‘You did kiss me just now,
you know; and I didn’t dislike you to, I own it, Jude. Only I
don’t want to let you do it again, just yet—considering how
we are circumstanced, don’t you see!’
He could never resist her when she pleaded (as she well
knew). And they sat side by side with joined hands, till she
aroused herself at some thought.
‘I can’t possibly go to that Temperance Inn, after your
telegraphing that message!’
‘Why not?’
 ‘You can see well enough!’
‘Very well; there’ll be some other one open, no doubt. I
have sometimes thought, since your marrying Phillotson
because of a stupid scandal, that under the affectation of
independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as
any woman I know!’
‘Not mentally. But I haven’t the courage of my views, as I
said before. I didn’t marry him altogether because of the
scandal. But sometimes a woman’s love of being loved gets
the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at
the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him
to love her while she doesn’t love him at all. Then, when she
sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what
she can to repair the wrong.’
‘You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him,
poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation,
married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing
it.’
‘Well—if you will put it brutally!—it was a little like that—
that and the scandal together—and your concealing from
me what you ought to have told me before!’
He could see that she was distressed and tearful at his
criticisms, and soothed her, saying: ‘There, dear; don’t
mind! Crucify me, if you will! You know you are all the world
to me, whatever you do!’
‘I am very bad and unprincipled—I know you think that!’
she said, trying to blink away her tears.
‘I think and know you are my dear Sue, from whom
neither length nor breadth, nor things present nor things to
come, can divide me!’33
Though so sophisticated in many things she was such a
child in others that this satisfied her, and they reached the
end of their journey on the best of terms. It was about ten
o’clock when they arrived at Aldbrickham, the county town
of North Wessex. As she would not go to the Temperance
Hotel because of the form of his telegram, Jude inquired for
another; and a youth who volunteered to find one wheeled
their luggage to The George further on, which proved to be
the inn at which Jude had stayed with Arabella on that one
occasion of their meeting after their division for years.
Owing, however, to their now entering it by another door,
and to his preoccupation, he did not at first recognize the
place. When they had engaged their respective rooms they
went down to a late supper. During Jude’s temporary
absence the waiting-maid spoke to Sue.
‘I think, ma’am, I remember your relation, or friend, or
whatever he is, coming here once before—late, just like this,
with his wife—a lady, at any rate, that wasn’t you by no
manner of means—jest as med be with you now.’
‘O do you?’ said Sue, with a certain sickness of heart.
‘Though I think you must be mistaken! How long ago was
it?’
‘About a month or two. A handsome, full-figured woman.
They had this room.’
When Jude came back and sat down to supper Sue
seemed moping and miserable. ‘Jude,’ she said to him
plaintively, at their parting that night upon the landing, ‘it is
not so nice and pleasant as it used to be with us! I don’t like
it here—I can’t bear the place! And I don’t like you so well as
I did!’
‘How fidgeted you seem, dear! Why do you change like
this?’
‘Because it was cruel to bring me here!’
‘Why?’
‘You were lately here with Arabella. There, now I have said
it!’
‘Dear me, why—’ said Jude looking round him. ‘Yes—it is
the same! I really didn’t know it, Sue. Well—it is not cruel,
since we have come as we have—two relations staying
together.’
‘How long ago was it you were here? Tell me, tell me!’
 ‘The day before I met you in Christminster, when we went
back to Marygreen together. I told you I had met her.’
‘Yes, you said you had met her, but you didn’t tell me all.
Your story was that you had met as estranged people, who
were not husband and wife at all in Heaven’s sight—not that
you had made it up with her.’
‘We didn’t make it up,’ he said sadly. ‘I can’t explain, Sue.’
‘You’ve been false to me; you, my last hope! And I shall
never forget it, never!’
‘But by your own wish, dear Sue, we are only to be
friends, not lovers! It is so very inconsistent of you to—’
‘Friends can be jealous!’
‘I don’t see that. You concede nothing to me and I have to
concede everything to you. After all, you were on good
terms with your husband at that time.’
‘No, I wasn’t, Jude. O how can you think so! And you have
taken me in, even if you didn’t intend to.’ She was so
mortified that he was obliged to take her into her room and
close the door lest the people should hear. ‘Was it this
room? Yes it was—I see by your look it was! I won’t have it
for mine! O it was treacherous of you to have her again! I
jumped out of the window!’
‘But Sue, she was, after all, my legal wife, if not—’
Slipping down on her knees Sue buried her face in the
bed and wept.
‘I never knew such an unreasonable—such a dog-in-the-
manger feeling,’ said Jude. ‘I am not to approach you, nor
anybody else!’
‘O don’t you understand my feeling! Why don’t you! Why
are you so gross! I jumped out of the window!’
‘Jumped out of window?’
‘I can’t explain!’
It was true that he did not understand her feeling very
well. But he did a little; and began to love her none the less.
‘I—I thought you cared for nobody—desired nobody in the
world but me at that time—and ever since!’ continued Sue.
 ‘It is true. I did not, and don’t now!’ said Jude, as
distressed as she.
‘But you must have thought much of her! Or—’
‘No—I need not—you don’t understand me either—women
never do! Why should you get into such a tantrum about
nothing?’
Looking up from the quilt she pouted provokingly: ‘If it
hadn’t been for that, perhaps I would have gone on to the
Temperance Hotel, after all, as you proposed; for I was
beginning to think I did belong to you!’
‘O, it is of no consequence!’ said Jude distantly.
‘I thought, of course, that she had never been really your
wife since she left you of her own accord years and years
ago! My sense of it was, that a parting such as yours from
her, and mine from him, ended the marriage.’
‘I can’t say more without speaking against her, and I don’t
want to do that,’ said he. ‘Yet I must tell you one thing,
which would settle the matter in any case. She has married
another man—really married him! I knew nothing about it till
after the visit we made here.’
‘Married another? … It is a crime—as the world treats it,
but does not believe.’
‘There—now you are yourself again. Yes, it is a crime—as
you don’t hold, but would fearfully concede. But I shall
never inform against her! and it is evidently a prick of
conscience in her that has led her to urge me to get a
divorce, that she may re-marry this man legally. So you
perceive I shall not be likely to see her again.’
‘And you didn’t really know anything of this when you saw
her?’ said Sue more gently, as she rose.
‘I did not. Considering all things, I don’t think you ought to
be angry, darling!’
‘I am not. But I shan’t go to the Temperance Hotel!’
He laughed. ‘Never mind!’ he said. ‘So that I am near you,
I am comparatively happy. It is more than this earthly
wretch called Me deserves—you spirit, you disembodied
creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom—hardly flesh
at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect
them to pass through you as through air! Forgive me for
being gross, as you call it! Remember that our calling
cousins when really strangers was a snare. The enmity of
our parents gave a piquancy to you in my eyes that was
intenser even than the novelty of ordinary new
acquaintance.’
‘Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley’s
“Epipsychidion” as if they meant me!’ she solicited, slanting
up closer to him as they stood. ‘Don’t you know them?’
‘I know hardly any poetry,’ he replied mournfully.
‘Don’t you? These are some of them:
“There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.
• • • • • •
A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman.…”34
O it is too flattering, so I won’t go on! But say it’s me!—say
it’s me!’
‘It is you, dear; exactly like you!’
‘Now I forgive you! And you shall kiss me just once there
—not very long.’ She put the tip of her finger gingerly to her
cheek; and he did as commanded. ‘You do care for me very
much, don’t you, in spite of my not—you know?’
‘Yes, sweet!’ he said with a sigh; and bade her good-night.

IV–6
In returning to his native town of Shaston as schoolmaster
Phillotson had won the interest and awakened the memories
of the inhabitants, who, though they did not honour him for
his miscellaneous acquirements as he would have been
honoured elsewhere, retained for him a sincere regard.
When, shortly after his arrival, he brought home a pretty
wife—awkwardly pretty for him, if he did not take care, they
said—they were glad to have her settle among them.
For some time after her flight from that home Sue’s
absence did not excite comment. Her place as monitor35 in
the school was taken by another young woman within a few
days of her vacating it, which substitution also passed
without remark, Sue’s services having been of a provisional
nature only. When, however, a month had passed, and
Phillotson casually admitted to acquaintance that he did not
know where his wife was staying, curiosity began to be
aroused; till, jumping to conclusions, people ventured to
affirm that Sue had played him false and run away from
him. The schoolmaster’s growing languor and listlessness
over his work gave countenance to the idea.
Though Phillotson had held his tongue as long as he
could, except to his friend Gillingham, his honesty and
directness would not allow him to do so when
misapprehensions as to Sue’s conduct spread abroad. On a
Monday morning the chairman of the School Committee
called, and after attending to the business of the school
drew Phillotson aside out of earshot of the children.
‘You’ll excuse my asking, Phillotson, since everybody is
talking of it: is this true as to your domestic affairs—that
your wife’s going away was on no visit, but a secret
elopement with a lover? If so, I condole with you.’
‘Don’t,’ said Phillotson. ‘There was no secret about it.’
‘She has gone to visit friends?’
‘No.’
‘Then what has happened?’
‘She has gone away under circumstances that usually call
for condolence with the husband. But I gave my consent.’
The chairman looked as if he had not apprehended the
remark.
‘What I say is quite true,’ Phillotson continued testily. ‘She
asked leave to go away with her lover, and I let her. Why
shouldn’t I? A woman of full age, it was a question for her
own conscience—not for me. I was not her gaoler. I can’t
explain any further. I don’t wish to be questioned.’
The children observed that much seriousness marked the
faces of the two men, and went home and told their parents
that something new had happened about Mrs. Phillotson.
Then Phillotson’s little maid-servant, who was a schoolgirl
just out of her standards, said that Mr. Phillotson had helped
in his wife’s packing, had offered her what money she
required, and had written a friendly letter to her young man,
telling him to take care of her. The chairman of committee
thought the matter over, and talked to the other managers
of the school, till a request came to Phillotson to meet them
privately. The meeting lasted a long time, and at the end the
schoolmaster came home, looking as usual pale and worn.
Gillingham was sitting in his house awaiting him.
‘Well, it is as you said,’ observed Phillotson, flinging
himself down wearily in a chair. ‘They have requested me to
send in my resignation on account of my scandalous
conduct in giving my tortured wife her liberty—or, as they
call it, condoning her adultery. But I shan’t resign!’
‘I think I would.’
‘I won’t. It is no business of theirs. It doesn’t affect me in
my public capacity at all. They may expel me if they like.’
‘If you make a fuss it will get into the papers, and you’ll
never get appointed to another school. You see, they have
to consider what you did as done by a teacher of youth—
and its effects as such upon the morals of the town; and, to
ordinary opinion, your position is indefensible. You must let
me say that.’
To this good advice, however, Phillotson would not listen.
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t go unless I am turned out.
And for this reason; that by resigning I acknowledge I have
acted wrongly by her; when I am more and more convinced
every day that in the sight of Heaven and by all natural,
straightforward humanity, I have acted rightly.’
 Gillingham saw that his rather headstrong friend would
not be able to maintain such a position as this; but he said
nothing further, and in due time—indeed, in a quarter of an
hour—the formal letter of dismissal arrived, the managers
having remained behind to write it after Phillotson’s
withdrawal. The latter replied that he should not accept
dismissal; and called a public meeting, which he attended,
although he looked so weak and ill that his friend implored
him to stay at home. When he stood up to give his reasons
for contesting the decision of the managers he advanced
them firmly, as he had done to his friend, and contended,
moreover, that the matter was a domestic theory which did
not concern them. This they overruled, insisting that the
private eccentricities of a teacher came quite within their
sphere of control, as it touched the morals of those he
taught. Phillotson replied that he did not see how an act of
natural charity could injure morals.
All the respectable inhabitants and well-to-do fellow-
natives of the town were against Phillotson to a man. But,
somewhat to his surprise, some dozen or more champions
rose up in his defence as from the ground.
It has been stated that Shaston was the anchorage of a
curious and interesting group of itinerants, who frequented
the numerous fairs and markets held up and down Wessex
during the summer and autumn months. Although Phillotson
had never spoken to one of these gentlemen they now nobly
led the forlorn hope in his defence. The body included two
cheap-jacks,36 a shooting-gallery proprietor and the ladies
who loaded the guns, a pair of boxing-masters, a steam-
roundabout manager, two travelling broom-makers, who
called themselves widows, a gingerbread-stall keeper, a
swing-boat owner, and a ‘test-your strength’ man.
This generous phalanx of supporters, and a few others of
independent judgment, whose own domestic experiences
had been not without vicissitude, came up and warmly
shook hands with Phillotson; after which they expressed
their thoughts so strongly to the meeting that issue was
joined, the result being a general scuffle, wherein a
blackboard was split, three panes of the school-windows
were broken, an inkbottle was spilled over a town-
councillor’s shirtfront, a churchwarden was dealt such a
topper with the map of Palestine that his head went right
through Samaria, and many black eyes and bleeding noses
were given, one of which, to everybody’s horror, was the
venerable incumbent’s, owing to the zeal of an emancipated
chimney-sweep, who took the side of Phillotson’s party.
When Phillotson saw the blood running down the rector’s
face he deplored almost in groans the untoward and
degrading circumstances, regretted that he had not
resigned when called upon, and went home so ill that next
morning he could not leave his bed.
The farcical yet melancholy event was the beginning of a
serious illness for him; and he lay in his lonely bed in the
pathetic state of mind of a middle-aged man who perceives
at length that his life, intellectual and domestic, is tending
to failure and gloom. Gillingham came to see him in the
evenings, and on one occasion mentioned Sue’s name.
‘She doesn’t care anything about me!’ said Phillotson.
‘Why should she?’
‘She doesn’t know you are ill.’
‘So much the better for both of us.’
‘Where are her lover and she living?’
‘At Melchester—I suppose; at least he was living there
some time ago.’
When Gillingham reached home he sat and reflected, and
at last wrote an anonymous line to Sue, on the bare chance
of its reaching her, the letter being enclosed in an envelope
addressed to Jude at the diocesan capital. Arriving at that
place it was forwarded to Marygreen in North Wessex, and
thence to Aldbrickham by the only person who knew his
present address—the widow who had nursed his aunt.
 Three days later, in the evening, when the sun was going
down in splendour over the lowlands of Blackmoor, and
making the Shaston windows like tongues of fire to the eyes
of the rustics in that Vale, the sick man fancied that he
heard somebody come to the house, and a few minutes
after there was a tap at the bedroom door. Phillotson did not
speak; the door was hesitatingly opened, and there entered
—Sue.
She was in light spring clothing, and her advent seemed
ghostly—like the flitting in of a moth. He turned his eyes
upon her, and flushed; but appeared to check his primary
impulse to speak.
‘I have no business here,’ she said, bending her
frightened face to him. ‘But I heard you were ill—very ill;
and—and as I know that you recognize other feelings
between man and woman than physical love, I have come.’
‘I am not very ill, my dear friend. Only unwell.’
‘I didn’t know that; and I am afraid that only a severe
illness would have justified my coming!’
‘Yes … yes. And I almost wish you had not come! It is a
little too soon—that’s all I mean. Still, let us make the best
of it. You haven’t heard about the school, I suppose?’
‘No—what about it?’
‘Only that I am going away from here to another place.
The managers and I don’t agree, and we are going to part—
that’s all.’
Sue did not for a moment, either now or later, suspect
what troubles had resulted to him from letting her go; it
never once seemed to cross her mind, and she had received
no news whatever from Shaston. They talked on slight and
ephemeral subjects and when his tea was brought up he
told the amazed little servant that a cup was to be set for
Sue. That young person was much more interested in their
history than they supposed, and as she descended the stairs
she lifted her eyes and hands in grotesque amazement.
While they sipped Sue went to the window and thoughtfully
said, ‘It is such a beautiful sunset, Richard.’
‘They are mostly beautiful from here, owing to the rays
crossing the mist of the Vale. But I lose them all, as they
don’t shine into this gloomy corner where I lie.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to see this particular one? It is like
heaven opened.’
‘Ah yes! But I can’t.’
‘I’ll help you to.’
‘No—the bedstead can’t be shifted.’
‘But see how I mean.’
She went to where a swing-glass37 stood, and taking it in
her hands carried it to a spot by the window where it could
catch the sunshine, moving the glass till the beams were
reflected into Phillotson’s face.
‘There—you can see the great red sun now!’ she said.
‘And I am sure it will cheer you—I do so hope it will!’ She
spoke with a childlike, repentant kindness, as if she could
not do much for him.
Phillotson smiled sadly. ‘You are an odd creature!’ he
murmured as the sun glowed in his eyes. ‘The idea of your
coming to see me after what has passed!’
‘Don’t let us go back upon that!’ she said quickly. ‘I have
to catch the omnibus for the train, as Jude doesn’t know I
have come; he was out when I started; so I must return
home almost directly. Richard, I am so very glad you are
better. You don’t hate me, do you? You have been such a
kind friend to me!’
‘I am glad to know you think so,’ said Phillotson huskily.
‘No. I don’t hate you!’
It grew dusk quickly in the gloomy room during their
intermittent chat, and when candles were brought and it
was time to leave she put her hand in his—or rather allowed
it to flit through his; for she was significantly light in touch.
She had nearly closed the door when he said, ‘Sue!’ He had
noticed that, in turning away from him, tears were on her
face and a quiver in her lip.
It was bad policy to recall her—he knew it while he
pursued it. But he could not help it. She came back.
‘Sue,’ he murmured, ‘do you wish to make it up, and stay?
I’ll forgive you and condone everything!’
‘O you can’t, you can’t!’ she said hastily. ‘You can’t
condone it now!’
‘He is your husband now, in effect, you mean, of course?’
‘You may assume it. He is obtaining a divorce from his
wife Arabella.’
‘His wife! It is altogether news to me that he has a wife.’
‘It was a bad marriage.’
‘Like yours.’
‘Like mine. He is not doing it so much on his own account
as on hers. She wrote and told him it would be a kindness to
her, since then she could marry and live respectably. And
Jude has agreed.’
‘A wife.… A kindness to her. Ah, yes; a kindness to her to
release her altogether.… But I don’t like the sound of it. I
can forgive, Sue.’
‘No, no! You can’t have me back now I have been so
wicked—as to do what I have done!’
There had arisen in Sue’s face that incipient fright which
showed itself whenever he changed from friend to husband,
and which made her adopt any line of defence against
marital feeling in him. ‘I must go now. I’ll come again—may
I?’
‘I don’t ask you to go, even now. I ask you to stay.’
‘I thank you, Richard; but I must. As you are not so ill as I
thought, I cannot stay!’
‘She’s his—his from lips to heel!’ said Phillotson; but so
faintly that in closing the door she did not hear it. The dread
of a reactionary change in the schoolmaster’s sentiments,
coupled, perhaps, with a faint shamefacedness at letting
even him know what a slipshod lack of thoroughness, from a
man’s point of view, characterized her transferred
allegiance, prevented her telling him of her, thus far,
incomplete relations with Jude; and Phillotson lay writhing
like a man in hell as he pictured the prettily dressed,
maddening compound of sympathy and averseness who
bore his name, returning impatiently to the home of her
lover.
Gillingham was so interested in Phillotson’s affairs, and so
seriously concerned about him, that he walked up the
hillside to Shaston two or three times a week, although,
there and back, it was a journey of nine miles, which had to
be performed between tea and supper, after a hard day’s
work in school. When he called on the next occasion after
Sue’s visit his friend was downstairs, and Gillingham noticed
that his restless mood had been supplanted by a more fixed
and composed one.
‘She’s been here since you called last,’ said Phillotson.
‘Not Mrs. Phillotson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah! You have made it up?’
‘No.… She just came, patted my pillow with her little
white hand, played the thoughtful nurse for half-an-hour,
and went away.’
‘Well—I’m hanged! A little hussy!’
‘What do you say?’
‘O—nothing!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what a tantalizing, capricious little woman! If she
were not your wife—’
‘She is not; she’s another man’s except in name and law.
And I have been thinking—it was suggested to me by a
conversation I had with her—that, in kindness to her, I ought
to dissolve the legal tie altogether; which, singularly
enough, I think I can do, now she has been back, and
refused my request to stay after I said I had forgiven her. I
believe that fact would afford me opportunity of doing it,
though I did not see it at the moment. What’s the use of
keeping her chained on to me if she doesn’t belong to me? I
know—I feel absolutely certain—that she would welcome my
taking such a step as the greatest charity to her. For though
as a fellow-creature she sympathizes with, and pities me,
and even weeps for me, as a husband she cannot endure
me—she loathes me—there’s no use in mincing words—she
loathes me, and my only manly, and dignified, and merciful
course is to complete what I have begun.… And for worldly
reasons, too, it will be better for her to be independent. I
have hopelessly ruined my prospects because of my
decision as to what was best for us, though she does not
know it; I see only dire poverty ahead from my feet to the
grave; for I can be accepted as teacher no more. I shall
probably have enough to do to make both ends meet during
the remainder of my life, now my occupation’s gone;38 and I
shall be better able to bear it alone. I may as well tell you
that what has suggested my letting her go is some news she
brought me—the news that Fawley is doing the same.’
‘O—he had a spouse too? A queer couple, these lovers!’
‘Well—I don’t want your opinion on that. What I was going
to say is that my liberating her can do her no possible harm,
and will open up a chance of happiness for her which she
has never dreamt of hitherto. For then they’ll be able to
marry, as they ought to have done at first.’
Gillingham did not hurry to reply. ‘I may disagree with
your motive,’ he said gently, for he respected views he
could not share. ‘But I think you are right in your
determination—if you can carry it out. I doubt, however, if
you can.’
 1. From John Milton’s pamphlet Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643).
2. For an indication of Hardy’s debts in this passage to the account of
Shaftesbury in Hutchins’s History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, see
p. 372 herein.
3. Michael Drayton (1563–1631), whose Polyolbion (1622), from which this line
is taken, is a versified guidebook to Britain.
4. Sandstone or limestone that can be easily cut. “Apsidal”: having an apse (a
semicircular arched recess at the end of a church). “Chantries”: chapels
endowed for the singing of masses for the founder’s soul.
5. King of England from 975 to 978; assassinated at Corfe Castle, Dorset, and
later buried at Shaftesbury.
6. Of the monasteries, by Henry VIII.
7. Those not included in the recognized canon of scripture; also known as the
Apocrypha. B. Harris Cowper’s Apocryphal Gospels was published in 1874.
8. Theological textbook.
9. Genesis 37.5–10.
10. Acts 7.55–59. Hardy is not quite accurate: Stephen saw “the heavens
opened” before he was stoned.
11. “Man proposes, but God disposes” (found in Thomas à Kempis and other
early writers).
12. Those who prepared the corpse for burial.
13. By that same fact.
14. Snares for wild creatures.
15. Standard theological authors from the 17th to the 19th centuries.
16. Hypocrite (see Matthew 23.27).
17. I.e., if we are not careful.
18. From On Liberty (1859), chap. 3, by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).
19. Argument resting on an appeal to reverence for an established authority.
20. Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), German scholar, author of The
Sphere and Duties of Government. He is quoted in Mill’s On Liberty.
21. Post supporting the handrail.
22. “William Barnes” [Hardy’s note]. Both quotations are from the poem
“Shaftesbury Feair.” Barnes (1801–1886) was a Dorset dialect poet and
scholar who grew up in this area near Shaftesbury; Hardy knew him well and
wrote a fine account of him.
23. “Drayton” [Hardy’s note].
24. Walking heavily (dialect).
25. Persuaded (dialect).
26. Hardy explained this dialect expression as follows: “the expression ‘good
now’ is still much in use in the interior of this country, though it is dying away
hereabout … its precise meaning being ‘You may be sure.’ … The
Americanism ‘I guess’ is near it” (W. R. Rutland, Thomas Hardy: A Study of His
Writings and Their Background [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938]).
27. Lovers in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818). Shelley was one
of Hardy’s favorite poets.
28. Types of idealized and innocent love in Bernardin de St. Pierre’s novel Paul et
Virginie (1787)—one of the three books Hardy’s mother gave him as a child.
29. Large drinking glass.
30. Upset (dialect).
31. From Robert Browning’s poem “The Statue and the Bust.”
32. A phrase from Robert Browning’s poem “By the Fire-side.”
33. Adapted from Romans 8.38–39.
34. From Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821).
35. Teacher’s assistant (strictly, a senior student).
36. Traveling hawkers who claimed to offer great bargains.
37. Mirror mounted on a stand so that its angle can be adjusted. Hardy noted in
his diary on March 22, 1881, during a long illness, that a friend “conceived
the kind idea of reflecting the sun into my face by a looking-glass” so that he
could watch a gorgeous sunset; the Life (p. 148) quotes this diary entry and
notes that the incident was used in Jude the Obscure.
38. “Othello’s occupation’s gone!” (Othello 3.3.358).

Part Fifth: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere

‘Thy aerial part, and all the fiery parts which are mingled in thee,
though by nature they have an upward tendency, still in obedience to
the disposition of the universe they are overpowered here in the
compound mass the body.’
M. Antoninus (Long)1

V–1
How Gillingham’s doubts were disposed of will most quickly
appear by passing over the series of dreary months and
incidents that followed the events of the last chapter, and
coming on to a Sunday in the February of the year following.
Sue and Jude were living in Aldbrickham, in precisely the
same relations that they had established between
themselves when she left Shaston to join him the year
before. The proceedings in the Law-Courts had reached their
consciousness but as a distant sound, and an occasional
missive which they hardly understood.
 They had met, as usual, to breakfast together in the little
house with Jude’s name on it, that he had taken at fifteen
pounds a year, with three-pounds-ten extra for rates and
taxes, and furnished with his aunt’s ancient and lumbering
goods, which had cost him about their full value to bring all
the way from Marygreen. Sue kept house, and managed
everything.
As he entered the room this morning Sue held up a letter
she had just received.
‘Well; and what is it about?’ he said after kissing her.
‘That the decree nisi in the case of Phillotson versus
Phillotson and Fawley, pronounced six months ago, has just
been made absolute.’2
‘Ah,’ said Jude, as he sat down.
The same concluding incident in Jude’s suit against
Arabella had occurred about a month or two earlier. Both
cases had been too insignificant to be reported in the
papers, further than by name in a long list of other
undefended cases.
‘Now then, Sue, at any rate, you can do what you like!’ He
looked at his sweetheart curiously.
‘Are we—you and I—just as free now as if we had never
married at all?’
‘Just as free—except, I believe, that a clergyman may
object personally to re-marry you, and hand the job on to
somebody else.’
‘But I wonder—do you think it is really so with us? I know
it is generally. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that my
freedom has been obtained under false pretences!’
‘How?’
‘Well—if the truth about us had been known, the decree
wouldn’t have been pronounced. It is only, is it, because we
have made no defence, and have led them into a false
supposition? Therefore is my freedom lawful, however
proper it may be?’
 ‘Well—why did you let it be under false pretences? You
have only yourself to blame,’ he said mischievously.
‘Jude—don’t! You ought not to be touchy about that still.
You must take me as I am.’
‘Very well, darling: so I will. Perhaps you were right. As to
your question, we were not obliged to prove anything. That
was their business. Anyhow we are living together.’
‘Yes. Though not in their sense.’
‘One thing is certain, that however the decree may be
brought about, a marriage is dissolved when it is dissolved.
There is this advantage in being poor obscure people like us
—that these things are done for us in a rough and ready
fashion. It was the same with me and Arabella. I was afraid
her criminal second marriage would have been discovered,
and she punished; but nobody took any interest in her—
nobody inquired, nobody suspected it. If we’d been
patented nobilities we should have had infinite trouble, and
days and weeks would have been spent in investigations.’
By degrees Sue acquired her lover’s cheerfulness at the
sense of freedom, and proposed that they should take a
walk in the fields, even if they had to put up with a cold
dinner on account of it. Jude agreed, and Sue went upstairs
and prepared to start, putting on a joyful coloured gown in
observance of her liberty; seeing which Jude put on a lighter
tie.
‘Now we’ll strut arm and arm,’ he said, ‘like any other
engaged couple. We’ve a legal right to.’
They rambled out of the town, and along a path over the
low-lying lands that bordered it, though these were frosty
now, and the extensive, seed-fields were bare of colour and
produce. The pair, however, were so absorbed in their own
situation that their surroundings were little in their
consciousness.
‘Well, my dearest, the result of all this is that we can
marry after a decent interval.’
‘Yes; I suppose we can,’ said Sue, without enthusiasm.
 ‘And aren’t we going to?’
‘I don’t like to say no, dear Jude; but I feel just the same
about it now as I have done all along. I have just the same
dread lest an iron contact should extinguish your tenderness
for me, and mine for you, as it did between our unfortunate
parents.’
‘Still, what can we do? I do love you, as you know, Sue.’
‘I know it abundantly. But I think I would much rather go
on living always as lovers, as we are living now, and only
meeting by day. It is so much sweeter—for the woman at
least, and when she is sure of the man. And henceforward
we needn’t be so particular as we have been about
appearances.’
‘Our experiences of matrimony with others have not been
encouraging, I own,’ said he with some gloom; ‘either owing
to our own dissatisfied, unpractical natures, or by our
misfortune. But we two—’
‘Should be two dissatisfied ones linked together, which
would be twice as bad as before.… I think I should begin to
be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to
cherish me under a Government stamp, and I was licensed
to be loved on the premises by you—Ugh, how horrible and
sordid! Although, as you are, free, I trust you more than any
other man in the world.’
‘No, no—don’t say I should change!’ he expostulated; yet
there was misgiving in his own voice also.
‘Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is
foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he
is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover. There
would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were
told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an
oath and signed contract between the parties to cease
loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal
possession being given, and to avoid each other’s society as
much as possible in public, there would be more loving
couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings
between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of
having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom
windows, and the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling
then.’
‘Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true,
you are not the only one in the world to see it, dear little
Sue. People go on marrying because they can’t resist
natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly
well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a
life’s discomfort. No doubt my father and mother, and your
father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled us in
habits of observation. But then they went and married just
the same, because they had ordinary passions. But you,
Sue, are such a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who—if
you’ll allow me to say it—has so little animal passion in you,
that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor
unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t.’
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘you’ve owned that it would probably
end in misery for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman
as you think. Fewer women like marriage than you suppose,
only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to confer,
and the social advantages it gains them sometimes—a
dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do
without.’
Jude fell back upon his old complaint—that, intimate as
they were, he had never once had from her an honest,
candid declaration that she loved or could love him. ‘I really
fear sometimes that you cannot,’ he said, with a
dubiousness approaching anger. ‘And you are so reticent. I
know that women are taught by other women that they
must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest
form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not
being men, these women don’t know that in looking back on
those he has had tender relations with, a man’s heart
returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her
conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy
affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by
them. A Nemesis3 attends the woman who plays the game
of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that,
sooner or later, her old admirers feel, under which they
allow her to go unlamented to her grave.’
Sue, who was regarding the distance, had acquired a
guilty look; and she suddenly replied in a tragic voice: ‘I
don’t think I like you to-day so well as I did, Jude!’
‘Don’t you? Why?’
‘O, well—you are not nice—too sermony. Though I
suppose I am so bad and worthless that I deserve the
utmost rigour of lecturing!’
‘No, you are not bad. You are a dear. But as slippery as an
eel when I want to get a confession from you.’
‘O yes I am bad, and obstinate, and all sorts! It is no use
your pretending I am not! People who are good don’t want
scolding as I do.… But now that I have nobody but you, and
nobody to defend me, it is very hard that I mustn’t have my
own way in deciding how I’ll live with you, and whether I’ll
be married or no!’
‘Sue, my own comrade and sweetheart, I don’t want to
force you either to marry or to do the other thing—of course
I don’t! It is too wicked of you to be so pettish! Now we
won’t say any more about it, and go on just the same as we
have done; and during the rest of our walk we’ll talk of the
meadows only, and the floods, and the prospect of the
farmers this coming year.’
After this the subject of marriage was not mentioned by
them for several days, though living as they were with only
a landing between them it was constantly in their minds.
Sue was assisting Jude very materially now: he had latterly
occupied himself on his own account in working and
lettering headstones, which he kept in a little yard at the
back of his little house, where in the intervals of domestic
duties she marked out the letters full size for him, and
blacked them in after he had cut them. It was a lower class
of handicraft than were his former performances as a
cathedral mason, and his only patrons were the poor people
who lived in his own neighbourhood, and knew what a
cheap man this ‘Jude Fawley Monumental Mason’ (as he
called himself on his front door) was to employ for the
simple memorials they required for their dead. But he
seemed more independent than before, and it was the only
arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to
be no burden on him, could render any assistance.

V–2
It was an evening at the end of the month, and Jude had just
returned home from hearing a lecture on ancient history in
the public hall not far off. When he entered Sue, who had
been keeping indoors during his absence, laid out supper for
him. Contrary to custom she did not speak. Jude had taken
up some illustrated paper, which he perused till, raising his
eyes, he saw that her face was troubled.
‘Are you depressed, Sue?’ he said.
She paused a moment. ‘I have a message for you,’ she
answered.
‘Somebody has called?’
‘Yes. A woman.’ Sue’s voice quavered as she spoke, and
she suddenly sat down from her preparations, laid her hands
in her lap, and looked into the fire. ‘I don’t know whether I
did right or not!’ she continued. ‘I said you were not at
home, and when she said she would wait, I said I thought
you might not be able to see her.’
‘Why did you say that, dear? I suppose she wanted a
headstone. Was she in mourning?’
‘No. She wasn’t in mourning, and she didn’t want a
headstone; and I thought you couldn’t see her.’ Sue looked
critically and imploringly at him.
‘But who was she? Didn’t she say?’
 ‘No. She wouldn’t give her name. But I know who she was
—I think I do! It was Arabella!’
‘Heaven save us! What should Arabella come for? What
made you think it was she?’
‘O, I can hardly tell. But I know it was! I feel perfectly
certain it was—by the light in her eyes as she looked at me.
She was a fleshy, coarse woman.’
‘Well—I should not have called Arabella coarse exactly,
except in speech, though she may be getting so by this time
under the duties of the public-house. She was rather
handsome When I knew her.’
‘Handsome! But yes!—so she is!’
‘I think I heard a quiver in your little mouth. Well, waiving
that, as she is nothing to me, and virtuously married to
another man, why should she come troubling us?’
‘Are you sure she’s married? Have you definite news of
it?’
‘No—not definite news. But that was why she asked me to
release her. She and the man both wanted to lead a proper
life, as I understood.’
‘O Jude—it was, it was Arabella!’ cried Sue, covering her
eyes with her hand. ‘And I am so miserable! It seems such
an ill-omen, whatever she may have come for. You could not
possibly see her, could you?’
‘I don’t really think I could. It would be so very painful to
talk to her now—for her as much as for me. However, she’s
gone. Did she say she would come again?’
‘No. But she went away very reluctantly.’
Sue, whom the least thing upset, could not eat any
supper, and when Jude had finished his he prepared to go to
bed. He had no sooner raked out the fire, fastened the
doors, and got to the top of the stairs than there came a
knock. Sue instantly emerged from her room, which she had
but just entered.
‘There she is again!’ Sue whispered in appalled accents.
‘How do you know?
 ‘She knocked like that last time.’
They listened, and the knocking came again. No servant
was kept in the house, and if the summons were to be
responded to one of them would have to do it in person. ‘I’ll
open a window,’ said Jude. ‘Whoever it is cannot be
expected to be let in at this time.’
He accordingly went into his bedroom and lifted the sash.
The lonely street of early retiring work-people was empty
from end to end save of one figure—that of a woman
walking up and down by the lamp a few yards off.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked.
‘Is that Mr. Fawley?’ came up from the woman, in a voice
which was unmistakably Arabella’s.
Jude replied that it was.
‘Is it she?’ asked Sue from the door, with lips apart.
‘Yes, dear,’ said Jude. ‘What do you want, Arabella?’ he
inquired.
‘I beg your pardon, Jude, for disturbing you,’ said Arabella
humbly. ‘But I called earlier—I wanted particularly to see
you tonight, if I could. I am in trouble, and have nobody to
help me!’
‘In trouble, are you?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. An inconvenient sympathy seemed
to be rising in Jude’s breast at the appeal. ‘But aren’t you
married?’ he said.
Arabella hesitated. ‘No, Jude, I am not,’ she returned. ‘He
wouldn’t, after all. And I am in great difficulty. I hope to get
another situation as barmaid soon. But it takes time, and I
really am in great distress, because of a sudden
responsibility that’s been sprung upon me from Australia; or
I wouldn’t trouble you—believe me I wouldn’t. I want to tell
you about it.’
Sue remained at gaze, in painful tension, hearing every
word, but speaking none.
 ‘You are not really in want of money, Arabella?’ he asked,
in a distinctly softened tone.
‘I have enough to pay for the night’s lodging I have
obtained, but barely enough to take me back again.’
‘Where are you living?’
‘In London still.’ She was about to give the address, but
she said, ‘I am afraid somebody may hear, so I don’t like to
call out particulars of myself so loud. If you could come
down and walk a little way with me towards the Prince Inn,
where I am staying to-night, I would explain all. You may as
well, for old time’s sake!’
‘Poor thing!—I must do her the kindness of hearing what’s
the matter, I suppose,’ said Jude in much perplexity. ‘As
she’s going back tomorrow it can’t make much difference.’
‘But you can go and see her to-morrow, Jude! Don’t go
now, Jude!’ came in plaintive accents from the doorway. ‘O,
it is only to entrap you, I know it is, as she did before! Don’t,
don’t go, dear! She is such a low-passioned woman—I can
see it in her shape, and hear it in her voice!’
‘But I shall go,’ said Jude. ‘Don’t attempt to detain me,
Sue. God knows I love her little enough now, but I don’t
want to be cruel to her.’ He turned to the stairs.
‘But she’s not your wife!’ cried Sue distractedly. ‘And I—’
‘And you are not either, dear, yet,’ said Jude.
‘O, but are you going to her? Don’t! Stay at home! Please,
please stay at home, Jude, and not go to her, now she’s not
your wife any more than I!’
‘Well, she is, rather more than you, come to that,’ he said,
taking his hat determinedly. ‘I’ve wanted you to be, and I’ve
waited with the patience of Job, and I don’t see that I’ve got
anything by my self-denial. I shall certainly give her
something, and hear what it is she is so anxious to tell me;
no man could do less!’
There was that in his manner which she knew it would be
futile to oppose. She said no more, but, turning to her room
as meekly as a martyr, heard him go downstairs, unbolt the
door, and close it behind him. With a woman’s disregard of
her dignity when in the presence of nobody but herself, she
also trotted down, sobbing articulately as she went. She
listened. She knew exactly how far it was to the inn that
Arabella had named as her lodging. It would occupy about
seven minutes to get there at an ordinary walking pace;
seven to come back again. If he did not return in fourteen
minutes he would have lingered. She looked at the clock. It
was twenty-five minutes to eleven. He might enter the inn
with Arabella, as they would reach it before closing time;
she might get him to drink with her; and Heaven only knew
what disasters would befall him then.
In a still suspense she waited on. It seemed as if the
whole time had nearly elapsed when the door was opened
again, and Jude appeared.
Sue gave a little ecstatic cry. ‘O, I knew I could trust you!
—how good you are!’—she began.
‘I can’t find her anywhere in this street, and I went out in
my slippers only. She has walked on, thinking I’ve been so
hard-hearted as to refuse her requests entirely, poor
woman. I’ve come back for my boots, as it is beginning to
rain.’
‘O, but why should you take such trouble for a woman
who has served you so badly!’ said Sue in a jealous burst of
disappointment.
‘But, Sue, she’s a woman, and I once cared for her; and
one can’t be a brute in such circumstances.’
‘She isn’t your wife any longer!’ exclaimed Sue,
passionately excited. ‘You mustn’t go out to find her! It isn’t
right! You can’t join her, now she’s a stranger to you. How
can you forget such a thing, my dear, dear one!’
‘She seems much the same as ever—an erring, careless,
unreflecting fellow-creature,’ he said, continuing to pull on
his boots. ‘What those legal fellows have been playing at in
London makes no difference in my real relations to her. If
she was my wife while she was away in Australia with
another husband she’s my wife now.’
‘But she wasn’t! That’s just what I hold! There’s the
absurdity!—Well—you’ll come straight back, after a few
minutes, won’t you, dear? She is too low, too coarse for you
to talk to long, Jude, and was always!’
‘Perhaps I am coarse too, worse luck! I have the germs of
every human infirmity in me, I verily believe—that was why I
saw it was so preposterous of me to think of being a curate.
I have cured myself of drunkenness I think; but I never know
in what new form a suppressed vice will break out in me! I
do love you, Sue, though I have danced attendance on you
so long for such poor returns! All that’s best and noblest in
me loves you, and your freedom from everything that’s
gross has elevated me, and enabled me to do what I should
never have dreamt myself capable of, or any man, a year or
two ago. It is all very well to preach about self-control, and
the wickedness of coercing a woman. But I should just like a
few virtuous people who have condemned me in the past,
about Arabella and other things, to have been in my
tantalizing position with you through these late weeks!—
they’d believe, I think, that I have exercised some little
restraint in always giving in to your wishes—living here in
one house, and not a soul between us.’
‘Yes, you have been good to me, Jude; I know you have,
my dear protector.’
‘Well—Arabella has appealed to me for help. I must go out
and speak to her, Sue, at least!’
‘I can’t say any more!—O, if you must, you must!’ she
said, bursting out into sobs that seemed to tear her heart. ‘I
have nobody but you, Jude, and you are deserting me! I
didn’t know you were like this—I can’t bear it, I can’t! If she
were yours it would be different!’
‘Or if you were.’
‘Very well then—if I must I must. Since you will have it so,
I agree! I will be. Only I didn’t mean to! And I didn’t want to
marry again, either! … But, yes—I agree, I agree! I do love
you. I ought to have known that you would conquer in the
long run, living like this!’
She ran across and flung her arms round his neck. ‘I am
not a cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you
at such a distance? I am sure you don’t think so! Wait and
see! I do belong to you, don’t I? I give in!’
‘And I’ll arrange for our marriage to-morrow, or as soon as
ever you wish.’
‘Yes, Jude.’
‘Then I’ll let her go,’ said he, embracing Sue softly. ‘I do
feel that it would be unfair to you to see her, and perhaps
unfair to her. She is not like you, my darling, and never was:
it is only bare justice to say that. Don’t cry any more. There;
and there; and there!’ He kissed her on one side, and on the
other, and in the middle, and rebolted the front door.
The next morning it was wet.
‘Now, dear,’ said Jude gaily at breakfast; ‘as this is
Saturday I mean to call about the banns at once, so as to
get the first publishing done to-morrow, or we shall lose a
week. Banns will do? We shall save a pound or two.’
Sue absently agreed to banns. But her mind for the
moment was running on something else. A glow had passed
away from her, and depression sat upon her features.
‘I feel I was wickedly selfish last night!’ she murmured. ‘It
was sheer unkindness in me—or worse—to treat Arabella as
I did. I didn’t care about her being in trouble, and what she
wished to tell you! Perhaps it was really something she was
justified in telling you. That’s some more of my badness, I
suppose! Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters
in—at least, mine has, if other people’s hasn’t.… I wonder
how she got on? I hope she reached the inn all right, poor
woman.’
‘O yes: she got on all right,’ said Jude placidly.
‘I hope she wasn’t shut out, and that she hadn’t to walk
the streets in the rain. Do you mind my putting on my
waterproof and going to see if she got in? I’ve been thinking
of her all the morning.’
‘Well—is it necessary? You haven’t the least idea how
Arabella is able to shift for herself. Still, darling, if you want
to go and inquire you can.’
There was no limit to the strange and unnecessary
penances which Sue would meekly undertake when in a
contrite mood; and this going to see all sorts of
extraordinary persons whose relation to her was precisely of
a kind that would have made other people shun them, was
her instinct ever, so that the request did not surprise him.
‘And when you come back,’ he added, ‘I’ll be ready to go
about the banns. You’ll come with me?’
Sue agreed, and went off under cloak and umbrella,
letting Jude kiss her freely, and returning his kisses in a way
she had never done before. Times had decidedly changed.
‘The little bird is caught at last!’ she said, a sadness
showing in her smile.
‘No—only nested,’ he assured her.
She walked along the muddy streets till she reached the
public-house mentioned by Arabella, which was not so very
far off. She was informed that Arabella had not yet left, and
in doubt how to announce herself so that her predecessor in
Jude’s affections would recognize her, she sent up word that
a friend from Spring Street had called, naming the place of
Jude’s residence. She was asked to step upstairs, and on
being shown into a room found that it was Arabella’s
bedroom, and that the latter had not yet risen. She halted
on the turn of her toe till Arabella cried from the bed, ‘Come
in and shut the door,’ which Sue accordingly did.
Arabella lay facing the window, and did not at once turn
her head: and Sue was wicked enough, despite her
penitence, to wish for a moment that Jude could behold her
forerunner now, with the daylight full upon her. She may
have seemed handsome enough in profile under the lamps,
but a frowsiness was apparent this morning; and the sight of
her own fresh charms in the looking-glass made Sue’s
manner bright, till she reflected what a meanly sexual
emotion this was in her, and hated herself for it.
‘I’ve just looked in to see if you got back comfortably last
night, that’s all,’ she said gently. ‘I was afraid afterwards
that you might have met with any mishap?’
‘O—how stupid this is! I thought my visitor was—your
friend—your husband—Mrs. Fawley, as I suppose you call
yourself?’ said Arabella, flinging her head back upon the
pillows with a disappointed toss, and ceasing to retain the
dimple she had just taken the trouble to produce.
‘Indeed I don’t,’ said Sue.
‘O, I thought you might have, even if he’s not really yours.
Decency is decency, any hour of the twenty-four.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Sue stiffly. ‘He is mine,
if you come to that!’
‘He wasn’t yesterday.’
Sue coloured roseate, and said ‘How do you know?’
‘From your manner when you talked to me at the door.
Well, my dear, you’ve been quick about it, and I expect my
visit last night helped it on—ha-ha! But I don’t want to get
him away from you.’
Sue looked out at the rain, and at the dirty toilet-cover,
and at the detached tail of Arabella’s hair hanging on the
looking-glass, just as it had done in Jude’s time; and wished
she had not come. In the pause there was a knock at the
door, and the chambermaid brought in a telegram for ‘Mrs.
Cartlett.’
Arabella opened it as she lay, and her ruffled look
disappeared.
‘I am much obliged to you for your anxiety about me,’ she
said blandly when the maid had gone; ‘but it is not
necessary you should feel it. My man finds he can’t do
without me after all, and agrees to stand by the promise to
marry again over here that he has made me all along. See
here! This is in answer to one from me.’ She held out the
telegram for Sue to read, but Sue did not take it. ‘He asks
me to come back. His little corner public in Lambeth would
go to pieces without me, he says. But he isn’t going to
knock me about when he has had a drop, any more after we
are spliced4 by English law than before! … As for you, I
should coax Jude to take me before the parson straight off,
and have done with it, if I were in your place. I say it as a
friend, my dear.’
‘He’s waiting to, any day,’ returned Sue, with frigid pride.
‘Then let him, in Heaven’s name. Life with a man is more
businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And
then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of
doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can’t
otherwise, unless he half runs you through with a knife, or
cracks your noddle5 with a poker. And if he bolts away from
you—I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there’s never
any knowing what a man med do—you’ll have the sticks o’
furniture, and won’t be looked upon as a thief. I shall marry
my man over again, now he’s willing, as there was a little
flaw in the first ceremony. In my telegram last night which
this is an answer to, I told him I had almost made it up with
Jude; and that frightened him, I expect! Perhaps I should
quite have done it if it hadn’t been for you,’ she said
laughing; ‘and then how different our histories might have
been from to-day! Never such a tender fool as Jude is if a
woman seems in trouble, and coaxes him a bit! Just as he
used to be about birds and things. However, as it happens,
it is just as well as if I had made it up, and I forgive you.
And, as I say, I’ll advise you to get the business legally done
as soon as possible. You’ll find it an awful bother later on if
you don’t.’
‘I have told you he is asking me to marry him—to make
our natural marriage a legal one,’ said Sue, with yet more
dignity. ‘It was quite by my wish that he didn’t the moment I
was free.’
 ‘Ah, yes—you are a oneyer6 too, like myself,’ said
Arabella, eyeing her visitor with humorous criticism. ‘Bolted
from your first, didn’t you, like me?’
‘Good morning!—I must go,’ said Sue hastily.
‘And I, too, must up and off!’ replied the other, springing
out of bed so suddenly that the soft parts of her person
shook. Sue jumped aside in trepidation. ‘Lord, I am only a
woman—not a six-foot sojer!7 … Just a moment dear,’ she
continued, putting her hand on Sue’s arm. ‘I really did want
to consult Jude on a little matter of business, as I told him. I
came about that more than anything else. Would he run up
to speak to me at the station as I am going? You think not.
Well, I’ll write to him about it. I didn’t want to write it, but
never mind—I will.’

V–3
When Sue reached home Jude was awaiting her at the door
to take the initial step towards their marriage. She clasped
his arm, and they went along silently together, as true
comrades ofttimes do. He saw that she was preoccupied,
and forbore to question her.
‘O Jude—I’ve been talking to her,’ she said at last. ‘I wish I
hadn’t! And yet it is best to be reminded of things.’
‘I hope she was civil.’
‘Yes. I—I can’t help liking her—just a little bit! She’s not an
ungenerous nature; and I am so glad her difficulties have all
suddenly ended.’ She explained how Arabella had been
summoned back, and would be enabled to retrieve her
position. ‘I was referring to our old question. What Arabella
has been saying to me has made me feel more than ever
how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is—a
sort of trap to catch a man—I can’t bear to think of it. I wish
I hadn’t promised to let you put up the banns this morning!’
‘O, don’t mind me. Any time will do for me. I thought you
might like to get it over quickly, now.’
 ‘Indeed, I don’t feel any more anxious now than I did
before. Perhaps with any other man I might be a little
anxious; but among the very few virtues possessed by your
family and mine, dear, I think I may set staunchness. So I
am not a bit frightened about losing you, now I really am
yours and you really are mine. In fact, I am easier in my
mind than I was, for my conscience is clear about Richard,
who now has a right to his freedom. I felt we were deceiving
him before.’
‘Sue, you seem when you are like this to be one of the
women of some grand old civilization, whom I used to read
about in my bygone, wasted, classical days, rather than a
denizen of a mere Christian country. I almost expect you to
say at these times that you have just been talking to some
friend whom you met in the Via Sacra, about the latest news
of Octavia or Livia; or have been listening to Aspasia’s
eloquence, or have been watching Praxiteles chiselling away
at his latest Venus, while Phryne8 made complaint that she
was tired of posing.’
They had now reached the house of the parish-clerk. Sue
stood back, while her lover went up to the door. His hand
was raised to knock when she said: ‘Jude!’
He looked round.
‘Wait a minute, would you mind?’
He came back to her.
‘Just let us think,’ she said timidly. ‘I had such a horrid
dream one night! … And Arabella—’
‘What did Arabella say to you?’ he asked.
‘O, she said that when people were tied up you could get
the law of a man better if he beat you—and how when
couples quarrelled.… Jude, do you think that when you must
have me with you by law, we shall be so happy as we are
now? The men and women of our family are very generous
when everything depends upon their good-will, but they
always kick against compulsion. Don’t you dread the
attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t
you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its
gratuitousness?’
‘Upon my word, love, you are beginning to frighten me,
too, with all this foreboding! Well, let’s go back and think it
over.’
Her face brightened. ‘Yes—so we will!’ said she. And they
turned from the clerk’s door, Sue taking his arm and
murmuring as they walked on homeward:
“Can you keep the bee from ranging,
Or the ring-dove’s neck from changing?
No! Nor fetter’d love …”9
They thought it over, or postponed thinking. Certainly
they postponed action, and seemed to live on in a dreamy
paradise. At the end of a fortnight or three weeks matters
remained unadvanced, and no banns were announced to
the ears of any Aldbrickham congregation.
Whilst they were postponing and postponing thus a letter
and a newspaper arrived before breakfast one morning from
Arabella. Seeing the handwriting Jude went up to Sue’s room
and told her, and as soon as she was dressed she hastened
down. Sue opened the newspaper; Jude the letter. After
glancing at the paper she held across the first page to him
with her finger on a paragraph; but he was so absorbed in
his letter that he did not turn awhile.
‘Look!’ said she.
He looked and read. The paper was one that circulated in
South London only, and the marked advertisement was
simply the announcement of a marriage at St. John’s
Church, Waterloo Road, under the names, ‘Cartlett-Donn’;
the united pair being Arabella and the innkeeper.
‘Well, it is satisfactory,’ said Sue complacently. ‘Though,
after this, it seems rather low to do likewise, and I am glad—
However, she is provided for now in a way, I suppose,
whatever her faults, poor thing. It is nicer that we are able
to think that, than to be uneasy about her. I ought, too, to
write to Richard and ask him how he is getting on, perhaps?’
But Jude’s attention was still absorbed. Having merely
glanced at the announcement he said in a disturbed voice:
‘Listen to this letter. What shall I say or do?
“The Three Horns, Lambeth.
“Dear Jude (I won’t be so distant as to call you Mr.
Fawley),—I send to-day a newspaper, from which useful
document you will learn that I was married over again
to Cartlett last Tuesday. So that business is settled right
and tight at last. But what I write about more particular
is that private affair I wanted to speak to you on when I
came down to Aldbrickham. I couldn’t very well tell it to
your lady friend, and should much have liked to let you
know it by word of mouth, as I could have explained
better than by letter. The fact is, Jude, that, though I
have never informed you before, there was a boy born
of our marriage, eight months after I left you, when I
was at Sydney, living with my father and mother. All
that is easily provable. As I had separated from you
before I thought such a thing was going to happen, and
I was over there, and our quarrel had been sharp, I did
not think it convenient to write about the birth. I was
then looking out for a good situation, so my parents
took the child, and he has been with them ever since.
That was why I did not mention it when I met you in
Christminster, nor at the law proceedings. He is now of
an intelligent age, of course, and my mother and father
have lately written to say that, as they have rather a
hard struggle over there, and I am settled comfortably
here, they don’t see why they should be encumbered
with the child any longer, his parents being alive. I
would have him with me here in a moment, but he is
not old enough to be of any use in the bar, nor will be
for years and years, and naturally Cartlett might think
 him in the way. They have, however, packed him off to
me in charge of some friends who happened to be
coming home, and I must ask you to take him when he
arrives, for I don’t know what to do with him. He is
lawfully yours, that I solemnly swear. If anybody says
he isn’t, call them brimstone liars, for my sake.
Whatever I may have done before or afterwards, I was
honest to you from the time we were married till I went
away, and I remain yours, &c.,
Arabella Cartlett.” ’
Sue’s look was one of dismay. ‘What will you do, dear?’
she asked faintly.
Jude did not reply, and Sue watched him anxiously, with
heavy breaths.
‘It hits me hard!’ said he in an under-voice. ‘It may be
true! I can’t make it out. Certainly, if his birth was exactly
when she says, he’s mine. I cannot think why she didn’t tell
me when I met her at Christminster, and came on here that
evening with her! … Ah—I do remember now that she said
something about having a thing on her mind that she would
like me to know, if ever we lived together again.’
‘The poor child seems to be wanted by nobody!’ Sue
replied, and her eyes filled.
Jude had by this time come to himself. ‘What a view of life
he must have, mine or not mine!’ he said. ‘I must say that, if
I were better off, I should not stop for a moment to think
whose he might be. I would take him and bring him up. The
beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What
does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child
is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are
collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled
to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for
their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like
class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other
virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.’
 Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion.
‘Yes—so it is, dearest! And we’ll have him here! And if he
isn’t yours it makes it all the better. I do hope he isn’t—
though perhaps I ought not to feel quite that! If he isn’t, I
should like so much for us to have him as an adopted child!’
‘Well, you must assume about him what is most pleasing
to you, my curious little comrade!’ he said. ‘I feel that,
anyhow, I don’t like to leave the unfortunate little fellow to
neglect. Just think of his life in a Lambeth pothouse,10 and all
its evil influences, with a parent who doesn’t want him, and
has, indeed, hardly seen him, and a stepfather who doesn’t
know him. “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the
night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived!”11
That’s what the boy—my boy, perhaps, will find himself
saying before long!’
‘O no!’
‘As I was the petitioner, I am really entitled to his custody,
I suppose.’
‘Whether or no, we must have him. I see that. I’ll do the
best I can to be a mother to him, and we can afford to keep
him somehow. I’ll work harder. I wonder when he’ll arrive?”
‘In the course of a few weeks, I suppose.’
‘I wish—When shall we have courage to marry, Jude?’
‘Whenever you have it, I think I shall. It remains with you
entirely, dear. Only say the word, and it’s done.’
‘Before the boy comes?’
‘Certainly.’
‘It would make a more natural home for him, perhaps,’
she murmured.
Jude thereupon wrote in purely formal terms to request
that the boy should be sent on to them as soon as he
arrived, making no remark whatever on the surprising
nature of Arabella’s information, nor vouchsafing a single
word of opinion on the boy’s paternity, nor on whether, had
he known all this, his conduct towards her would have been
quite the same.
 In the down-train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham
station about ten o’clock the next evening, a small, pale
child’s face could be seen in the gloom of a third-class
carriage. He had large, frightened eyes, and wore a white
woollen cravat, over which a key was suspended round his
neck by a piece of common string: the key attracting
attention by its occasional shine in the lamplight. In the
band of his hat his half-ticket was stuck. His eyes remained
mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never
turned to the window even when a station was reached and
called. On the other seat were two or three passengers, one
of them a working woman who held a basket on her lap, in
which was a tabby kitten. The woman opened the cover now
and then, whereupon the kitten would put out its head, and
indulge in playful antics. At these the fellow-passengers
laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key and ticket,
who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed
mutely to say: ‘All laughing comes from misapprehension.
Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.’
Occasionally at a stoppage the guard would look into the
compartment and say to the boy, ‘All right, my man. Your
box is safe in the van.’ The boy would say, ‘Yes,’ without
animation, would try to smile, and fail.
He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so
badly that his real self showed through crevices. A ground
swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to
lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a
back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared
not to care about what it saw.
When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they
did one by one—even the kitten curling itself up in the
basket, weary of its too circumscribed play—the boy
remained just as before. He then seemed to be doubly
awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed Divinity, sitting passive
and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole
rounded lives rather than their immediate figures.
 This was Arabella’s boy. With her usual carelessness she
had postponed writing to Jude about him till the eve of his
landing, when she could absolutely postpone no longer,
though she had known for weeks of his approaching arrival,
and had, as she truly said, visited Aldbrickham mainly to
reveal the boy’s existence and his near home-coming to
Jude. This very day on which she had received her former
husband’s answer at some time in the afternoon, the child
reached the London Docks, and the family in whose charge
he had come, having put him into a cab for Lambeth, and
directed the cabman to his mother’s house, bade him good-
bye, and went their way.
On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him
over with an expression that was as good as saying, ‘You are
very much what I expected you to be,’ had given him a good
meal, a little money, and, late as it was getting, despatched
him to Jude by the next train, wishing her husband Cartlett,
who was out, not to see him.
The train reached Aldbrickham, and the boy was
deposited on the lonely platform beside his box. The
collector took his ticket and, with a meditative sense of the
unfitness of things, asked him where he was going by
himself at that time of night.
‘Going to Spring Street,’ said the little one impassively.
‘Why, that’s a long way from here; a’most out in the
country; and the folks will be gone to bed.’
‘I’ve got to go there.’
‘You must have a fly for your box.’
‘No. I must walk.’
‘O well: you’d better leave your box here and send for it.
There’s a ’bus goes half-way, but you’ll have to walk the
rest.’
‘I am not afraid.’
‘Why didn’t your friends come to meet ’ee?’
‘I suppose they didn’t know I was coming.’
‘Who is your friends?’
 ‘Mother didn’t wish me to say.’
‘All I can do, then, is to take charge of this. Now walk as
fast as you can.’
Saying nothing further the boy came out into the street,
looking round to see that nobody followed or observed him.
When he had walked some little distance he asked for the
street of his destination. He was told to go straight on quite
into the outskirts of the place.
The child fell into a steady mechanical creep which had in
it an impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of
the breeze, or of the cloud. He followed his directions
literally, without an inquiring gaze at anything. It could have
been seen that the boy’s ideas of life were different from
those of the local boys. Children begin with detail, and learn
up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and
gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to
have begun with the generals of life, and never to have
concerned himself with the particulars. To him the houses,
the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparently
regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows; but as
human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide
dark world.
He found the way to the little lane, and knocked at the
door of Jude’s house. Jude had just retired to bed, and Sue
was about to enter her chamber adjoining when she heard
the knock and came down.
‘Is this where father lives?’ asked the child.
‘Who?’
‘Mr. Fawley, that’s his name.’
Sue ran up to Jude’s room and told him, and he hurried
down as soon as he could, though to her impatience he
seemed long.
‘What—is it he—so soon?’ she asked as Jude came.
She scrutinized the child’s features, and suddenly went
away into the little sitting-room adjoining. Jude lifted the boy
to a level with himself, keenly regarded him with gloomy
tenderness, and telling him he would have been met if they
had known of his coming so soon, set him provisionally in a
chair whilst he went to look for Sue, whose
supersensitiveness was disturbed, as he knew. He found her
in the dark, bending over an arm-chair. He enclosed her with
his arm, and putting his face by hers, whispered, ‘What’s
the matter?’
‘What Arabella says is true—true! I see you in him!’
‘Well: that’s one thing in my life as it should be, at any
rate.’
‘But the other half of him is—she! And that’s what I can’t
bear! But I ought to—I’ll try to get used to it; yes, I ought!’
‘Jealous little Sue! I withdraw all remarks about your
sexlessness. Never mind! Time may right things.… And Sue,
darling; I have an idea! We’ll educate and train him with a
view to the University. What I couldn’t accomplish in my own
person perhaps I can carry out through him? They are
making it easier for poor students now, you know.’
‘O you dreamer!’ said she, and holding his hand returned
to the child with him. The boy looked at her as she had
looked at him. ‘Is it you who’s my real mother at last?’ he
inquired.
‘Why? Do I look like your father’s wife?’
‘Well, yes; ’cept he seems fond of you, and you of him.
Can I call you mother?’
Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to
cry. Sue thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing
likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from
another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical
stir in her own.
‘You may call me mother, if you wish to, my poor dear!’
she said, bending her cheek against his to hide her tears.
‘What’s this round your neck?’ asked Jude with affected
calmness.
‘The key of my box that’s at the station.’
 They bustled about and got him some supper, and made
him up a temporary bed, where he soon fell asleep. Both
went and looked at him as he lay.
‘He called you mother two or three times before he
dropped off,’ murmured Jude. ‘Wasn’t it odd that he should
have wanted to!’
‘Well—it was significant,’ said Sue. ‘There’s more for us to
think about in that one little hungry heart than in all the
stars of the sky.… I suppose, dear, we must pluck up
courage, and get that ceremony over? It is no use struggling
against the current, and I feel myself getting intertwined
with my kind. O Jude, you’ll love me dearly, won’t you,
afterwards! I do want to be kind to this child, and to be a
mother to him; and our adding the legal form to our
marriage might make it easier for me.’

V–4
Their next and second attempt thereat was more
deliberately made, though it was begun on the morning
following the singular child’s arrival at their home.
Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his
quaint and weird face set, and his eyes resting on things
they did not see in the substantial world.
‘His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene,’12 said Sue.
‘What is your name, dear? Did you tell us?’
‘Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a
nick-name; because I look so aged, they say.’
‘And you talk so, too,’ said Sue tenderly. ‘It is strange,
Jude, that these preternaturally old boys almost always
come from new countries. But what were you christened?’
‘I never was.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because, if I died in damnation, ’twould save the expense
of a Christian funeral.’
 ‘O—your name is not Jude, then?’ said his father with
some disappointment.
The boy shook his head. ‘Never heerd on it.’
‘Of course not,’ said Sue quickly; ‘since she was hating
you all the time!’
‘We’ll have him christened,’ said Jude; and privately to
Sue: ‘The day we are married.’ Yet the advent of the child
disturbed him.
Their position lent them shyness, and having an
impression that a marriage at a Superintendent Registrar’s
office was more private than an ecclesiastical one, they
decided to avoid a church this time. Both Sue and Jude
together went to the office of the district to give notice: they
had become such companions that they could hardly do
anything of importance except in each other’s company.
Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over
his shoulder and watching his hand as it traced the words.
As she read the four-square undertaking, never before seen
by her, into which her own and Jude’s names were inserted,
and by which that very volatile essence, their love for each
other, was supposed to be made permanent, her face
seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. ‘Names and
Surnames of the Parties’—(they were to be parties now, not
lovers, she thought). ‘Condition’—(a horrid idea)—‘Rank or
Occupation’—‘Age’—‘Dwelling at’—‘Length of
Residence’—‘Church or Building in which the Marriage is to
be solemnized’—‘District and County in which the Parties
respectively dwell.’
‘It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it!’ she said on their way
home. ‘It seems making a more sordid business of it even
than signing the contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry
in a church. But we’ll try to get through with it, dearest,
now.’
‘We will. “For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife
and hath not taken her? Let him go and return unto his
house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take her.”13
So said the Jewish law-giver.’
‘How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to
have been a parson. I can only quote profane writers!’
During the interval before the issuing of the certificate
Sue, in her housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past
the office, and furtively glancing in saw affixed to the wall
the notice of the purposed clinch to their union. She could
not bear its aspect. Coming after her previous experience of
matrimony, all the romance of their attachment seemed to
be starved away by placing her present case in the same
category. She was usually leading little Father Time by the
hand, and fancied that people thought him hers, and
regarded the intended ceremony as the patching up of an
old error.
Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in
some slight degree by inviting to the wedding the only
person remaining on earth who was associated with his
early life at Marygreen—the aged widow Mrs. Edlin, who had
been his great-aunt’s friend and nurse in her last illness. He
hardly expected that she would come; but she did, bringing
singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brass
snuffers,14 an ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an
enormous bag of goose feathers towards a bed. She was
allotted the spare room in Jude’s house, whither she retired
early, and where they could hear her through the ceiling
below, honestly saying the Lord’s Prayer in a loud voice, as
the Rubric15 directed.
As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue
and Jude were still sitting up—it being in fact only ten
o’clock—she dressed herself again, and came down; and
they all sat by the fire till a late hour—Father Time included;
though, as he never spoke, they were hardly conscious of
him.
‘Well, I bain’t set against marrying as your great-aunt
was,’ said the widow. ‘And I hope ’twill be a jocund wedding
for ye in all respects this time. Nobody can hope it more,
knowing what I do of your families, which is more, I suppose,
than anybody else now living. For they have been unlucky
that way, God knows.’
Sue breathed uneasily.
‘They was always good-hearted people, too—wouldn’t kill
a fly if they knowed it,’ continued the wedding guest. ‘But
things happened to thwart ’em, and if everything wasn’t
vitty16 they were upset. No doubt that’s how he that the tale
is told of came to do what ’a did—if he were one of your
family.’
‘What was that?’ said Jude.
‘Well—that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted17 just on
the brow of the hill by the Brown House—not far from the
milestone between Marygreen and Alfredston, where the
other road branches off. But Lord, ’twas in my grandfather’s
time; and it medn’ have been one of your folk at all.’
‘I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well,’
murmured Jude. ‘But I never heard of this. What—did this
man—my ancestor and Sue’s—kill his wife?’
‘ ’Twer not that exactly. She ran away from him, with their
child, to her friends; and while she was there the child died.
He wanted the body, to bury it where his people lay, but she
wouldn’t give it up. Her husband then came in the night with
a cart, and broke into the house to steal the coffin away; but
he was catched, and being obstinate, wouldn’t tell what he
broke in for. They brought it in burglary, and that’s why he
was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill. His wife
went mad after he was dead. But it medn’ be true that he
belonged to ye more than to me.’
A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as
if out of the earth: ‘If I was you, mother, I wouldn’t marry
father!’ It came from little Time, and they started, for they
had forgotten him.
‘O, it is only a tale,’ said Sue cheeringly.
 After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve
of the solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest
good-night, retired.
The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified
with the hours, took Jude privately into the sitting-room
before starting. ‘Jude, I want you to kiss me, as a lover,
incorporeally,’ she said, tremulously nestling up to him, with
damp lashes. ‘It won’t be ever like this any more, will it! I
wish we hadn’t begun the business. But I suppose we must
go on. How horrid that story was last night! It spoilt my
thoughts of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doom
overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus.’18
‘Or the house of Jeroboam,’ said the quondam19
theologian.
‘Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go
marrying! I am going to vow to you in the same words I
vowed in to my other husband, and you to me in the same
as you used to your other wife; regardless of the deterrent
lesson we were taught by those experiments!’
‘If you are uneasy I am made unhappy,’ said he. ‘I had
hoped you would feel quite joyful. But if you don’t, you
don’t. It is no use pretending. It is a dismal business to you,
and that makes it so to me!’
‘It is unpleasantly like that other morning—that’s all,’ she
murmured. ‘Let us go on now.’
They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no
witness accompanying them except the Widow Edlin. The
day was chilly and dull, and a clammy fog blew through the
town from ‘Royal-tower’d Thame.’20 On the steps of the
office there were the muddy footmarks of people who had
entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas. Within the
office several persons were gathered, and our couple
perceived that a marriage between a soldier and a young
woman was just in progress. Sue, Jude, and the widow stood
in the background while this was going on, Sue reading the
notices of marriage on the wall. The room was a dreary
place to two of their temperament, though to its usual
frequenters it doubtless seemed ordinary enough. Law-
books in musty calf covered one wall, and elsewhere were
Post-Office Directories, and other books of reference. Papers
in packets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed around, and
some iron safes filled a recess; while the bare wood floor
was, like the doorstep, stained by previous visitors.
The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and
timid; she was soon, obviously, to become a mother, and
she had a black eye. Their little business was soon done,
and the twain and their friends straggled out, one of the
witnesses saying casually to Jude and Sue in passing, as if
he had known them before: ‘See the couple just come in?
Ha, Ha! That fellow is just out of gaol this morning. She met
him at the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She’s
paying for everything.’
Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely
cropped, with a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his
arm, ruddy with liquor and the satisfaction of being on the
brink of a gratified desire. They jocosely saluted the
outgoing couple, and went forward in front of Jude and Sue,
whose diffidence was increasing. The latter drew back and
turned to her lover, her mouth shaping itself like that of a
child about to give way to grief:
‘Jude—I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The
place gives me the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the
climax of our love! I wish it had been at church, if it had to
be at all. It is not so vulgar there!’
‘Dear little girl,’ said Jude. ‘How troubled and pale you
look!’
‘It must be performed here now, I suppose?’
‘No—perhaps not necessarily.’
He spoke to the clerk, and came back. ‘No—we need not
marry here or anywhere, unless we like, even now,’ he said.
‘We can be married in a church, if not with the same
certificate with another he’ll give us, I think. Anyhow, let us
go out till you are calmer, dear, and I too, and talk it over.’
They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had
committed a misdemeanour, closing the door without noise,
and telling the widow, who had remained in the entry, to go
home and await them; that they would call in any casual
passers as witnesses, if necessary. When in the street they
turned into an unfrequented side alley, where they walked
up and down as they had done long ago in the Market-house
at Melchester.
‘Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of
it, it strikes me. Still, anything that pleases you will please
me.’
‘But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be
there, didn’t you?’
‘Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn’t
care much about it. The place depressed me almost as
much as it did you—it was ugly. And then I thought of what
you had said this morning as to whether we ought.’
They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little
voice began anew: ‘It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like
this! And yet how much better than to act rashly a second
time.… How terrible that scene was to me! The expression
in that flabby woman’s face, leading her on to give herself
to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a
lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a
nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her
character, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage
to a tyrant who scorned her—a man whom to avoid for ever
was her only chance of salvation.… This is our parish
church, isn’t it? This is where it would have to be, if we did it
in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going
on.’
Jude went up and looked in at the door. ‘Why—it is a
wedding here too,’ he said. ‘Everybody seems to be on our
tack21 to-day.’
 Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over,
when there was always a crowd of marriages. ‘Let us listen,’
she said, ‘and find how it feels to us when performed in a
church.’
They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched
the proceedings at the altar. The contracting couple
appeared to belong to the well-to-do middle class, and the
wedding altogether was of ordinary prettiness and interest.
They could see the flowers tremble in the bride’s hand, even
at that distance, and could hear her mechanical murmur of
words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all
under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude
listened, and severally saw themselves in time past going
through the same form of self-committal.
‘It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me
doing it over again with my present knowledge,’ Sue
whispered. ‘You see, they are fresh to it, and take the
proceedings as a matter of course. But having been
awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at least as I
have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings
perhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go
and undertake the same thing again with open eyes.
Coming in here and seeing this has frightened me from a
church wedding as much as the other did from a registry
one.… We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others
may feel confident in I feel doubts of—my being proof
against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!’
Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in
whispers the object-lesson before them. And Jude said he
also thought they were both too thin-skinned—that they
ought never to have been born—much less have come
together for the most preposterous of all joint-ventures for
them—matrimony.
His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he
indeed felt that they ought not to go in cold blood and sign
that life-undertaking again? ‘It is awful if you think we have
found ourselves not strong enough for it, and knowing this,
are proposing to perjure ourselves,’ she said.
‘I fancy I do think it—since you ask me,’ said Jude.
‘Remember I’ll do it if you wish, own darling.’ While she
hesitated he went on to confess that, though he thought
they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked by the dread
of incompetency just as she did—from their peculiarities,
perhaps, because they were unlike other people. ‘We are
horribly sensitive; that’s really what’s the matter with us,
Sue!’ he declared.
‘I fancy more are like us than we think!’
‘Well, I don’t know. The intention of the contract is good,
and right for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat
its own ends because we are the queer sort of people we
are—folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out
cordiality and spontaneousness.’
Sue still held that there was not much queer or
exceptional in them: that all were so. ‘Everybody is getting
to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that’s all. In
fifty, a hundred, years the descendants of these two will act
and feel worse than we. They will see weltering humanity
still more vividly than we do now, as
Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,22
and will be afraid to reproduce them.’
‘What a terrible line of poetry! … though I have felt it
myself about my fellow-creatures, at morbid times.’
Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:
‘Well—the general question is not our business, and why
should we plague ourselves about it? However different our
reasons are we come to the same conclusion; that for us
particular two, an irrevocable oath is risky. Then, Jude, let us
go home without killing our dream! Yes? How good you are,
my friend: you give way to all my whims!’
‘They accord very much with my own.’
 He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention
of everybody present was taken up in observing the burial
procession entering the vestry; and then they came outside
the building. By the door they waited till two or three
carriages, which had gone away for a while, returned, and
the new husband and wife came into the open daylight. Sue
sighed.
‘The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland
which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!’23
‘Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man.
That’s what some women fail to see, and instead of
protesting against the conditions they protest against the
man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse
the man who crushes against her, when he is only the
helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him.’
‘Yes—some are like that, instead of uniting with the man
against the common enemy, coercion.’ The bride and
bridegroom had by this time driven off, and the two moved
away with the rest of the idlers. ‘No—don’t let’s do it,’ she
continued. ‘At least just now.’
They reached home, and passing the window arm in arm
saw the widow looking out at them. ‘Well,’ cried their guest
when they entered, ‘I said to myself when I zeed ye coming
so loving up to the door, “They made up their minds at last,
then!” ’
They briefly hinted that they had not.
‘What—and hadn’t ye really done it? Chok’ it all, that I
should have lived to see a good old saying like “marry in
haste and repent at leisure” spoiled like this by you two! ’Tis
time I got back again to Marygreen—sakes if tidden24—if this
is what the new notions be leading us to! Nobody thought o’
being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much else but
a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor
man were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’
dibs!25
 ‘Don’t tell the child when he comes in,’ whispered Sue
nervously. ‘He’ll think it has all gone on right, and it will be
better that he should not be surprised and puzzled. Of
course it is only put off for reconsideration. If we are happy
as we are, what does it matter to anybody?’

V–5
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not
require him to express his personal views upon the grave
controversy above given. That the twain were happy—
between their times of sadness—was indubitable. And when
the unexpected apparition of Jude’s child in the house had
shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it had looked,
but one that brought into their lives a new and tender
interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind, it rather helped
than injured their happiness.
To be sure, with such pleasing anxious beings26 as they
were, the boy’s coming also brought with it much thought
for the future, particularly as he seemed at present to be
singularly deficient in all the usual hopes of childhood. But
the pair tried to dismiss, for a while at least, a too
strenuously forward view.
There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten
thousand souls; the town may be called Stoke-Barehills. It
stands with its gaunt, unattractive, ancient church, and its
new red brick suburb, amid the open, chalk-soiled
cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary triangle which
has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham and
Wintoncester, and the important military station of
Quartershot. The great western highway from London
passes through it, near a point where the road branches into
two, merely to unite again some twenty miles further
westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there used to
arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days,
endless questions of choice between the respective ways.
But the question is now as dead as the scot-and-lot
freeholder,27 the road waggoner, and the mail coachman
who disputed it; and probably not a single inhabitant of
Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads which
part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up
and down the great western highway daily.
The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its
cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediæval
ruins beside the railway; the modern chapels, modern
tombs, and modern shrubs, having a look of intrusiveness
amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient
walls.
On a certain day, however, in the particular year which
has now been reached by this narrative—the month being
early June—the features of the town excite little interest,
though many visitors arrive by the trains; some down trains,
in especial, nearly emptying themselves here. It is the week
of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose vast
encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town
like the tents of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts,
booths, pavilions, arcades, porticoes—every kind of
structure short of a permanent one—cover the green field
for the space of a square half-mile, and the crowds of
arrivals walk through the town in a mass, and make straight
for the exhibition ground. The way thereto is lined with
shows, stalls, and hawkers on foot, who make a market-
place of the whole roadway to the show proper, and lead
some of the improvident to lighten their pockets appreciably
before they reach the gates of the exhibition they came
expressly to see.
It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast
arriving excursion trains two from different directions enter
the two contiguous railway-stations at almost the same
minute. One, like several which have preceded it, comes
from London: the other by a cross line from Aldbrickham;
and from the London train alights a couple; a short, rather
bloated man, with a globular stomach and small legs,
resembling a top on two pegs, accompanied by a woman of
rather fine figure and rather red face, dressed in black
material, and covered with beads from bonnet to skirt, that
made her glisten as if clad in chain-mail.
They cast their eyes around. The man was about to hire a
fly as some others had done, when the woman said, ‘Don’t
be in such a hurry, Cartlett. It isn’t so very far to the show-
yard. Let us walk down the street into the place. Perhaps I
can pick up a cheap bit of furniture or old china. It is years
since I was here—never since I lived as a girl at
Aldbrickham, and used to come across for a trip sometimes
with my young man.’
‘You can’t carry home furniture by excursion train,’ said,
in a thick voice, her husband, the landlord of The Three
Horns, Lambeth; for they had both come down from the
tavern in that ‘excellent, densely populated, gin-drinking
neighbourhood,’ which they had occupied ever since the
advertisement in those words had attracted them thither.
The configuration of the landlord showed that he, too, like
his customers, was becoming affected by the liquors he
retailed.
‘Then I’ll get it sent, if I see any worth having,’ said his
wife.
They sauntered on, but had barely entered the town when
her attention was attracted by a young couple leading a
child, who had come out from the second platform, into
which the train from Aldbrickham had steamed. They were
walking just in front of the inn-keepers.
‘Sakes alive!’ said Arabella.
‘What’s that?’ said Cartlett.
‘Who do you think that couple is? Don’t you recognize the
man?’
‘No.’
‘Not from the photos I have showed you?’
‘Is it Fawley?’
 ‘Yes—of course.’
‘Oh, well. I suppose he was inclined for a little sight-
seeing like the rest of us.’ Cartlett’s interest in Jude,
whatever it might have been when Arabella was new to him,
had plainly flagged since her charms and her idiosyncrasies,
her supernumerary hair-coils, and her optional dimples,
were becoming as a tale that is told.28
Arabella so regulated her pace and her husband’s as to
keep just in the rear of the other three, which it was easy to
do without notice in such a stream of pedestrians. Her
answers to Cartlett’s remarks were vague and slight, for the
group in front interested her more than all the rest of the
spectacle.
‘They are rather fond of one another and of their child,
seemingly,’ continued the publican.
‘Their child! ’Tisn’t their child,’ said Arabella with a
curious, sudden covetousness. ‘They haven’t been married
long enough for it to be theirs!’
But although the smouldering maternal instinct was
strong enough in her to lead her to quash her husband’s
conjecture, she was not disposed on second thoughts to be
more candid than necessary. Mr. Cartlett had no other idea
than that his wife’s child by her first husband was with his
grandparents at the Antipodes.
‘O I suppose not. She looks quite a girl.’
‘They are only lovers, or lately married, and have the
child in charge, as anybody can see.’
All continued to move ahead. The unwitting Sue and Jude,
the couple in question, had determined to make this
Agricultural Exhibition within twenty miles of their own town
the occasion of a day’s excursion which should combine
exercise and amusement with instruction, at small expense.
Not regardful of themselves alone, they had taken care to
bring Father Time, to try every means of making him kindle
and laugh like other boys, though he was to some extent a
hindrance to the delightfully unreserved intercourse in their
pilgrimages which they so much enjoyed. But they soon
ceased to consider him an observer, and went along with
that tender attention to each other which the shyest can
scarcely disguise, and which these, among entire strangers
as they imagined, took less trouble to disguise than they
might have done at home. Sue, in her new summer clothes,
flexible and light as a bird, her little thumb stuck up by the
stem of her white cotton sunshade, went along as if she
hardly touched ground, and as if a moderately strong puff of
wind would float her over the hedge into the next field. Jude,
in his light grey holiday-suit, was really proud of her
companionship, not more for her external attractiveness
than for her sympathetic words and ways. That complete
mutual understanding, in which every glance and
movement was as effectual as speech for conveying
intelligence between them, made them almost the two parts
of a single whole.
The pair with their charge passed through the turnstiles,
Arabella and her husband not far behind them. When inside
the enclosure the publican’s wife could see that the two
ahead began to take trouble with the youngster, pointing
out and explaining the many objects of interest, alive and
dead; and a passing sadness would touch their faces at their
every failure to disturb his indifference.
‘How she sticks to him!’ said Arabella. ‘O no—I fancy they
are not married, or they wouldn’t be so much to one another
as that.… I wonder!’
‘But I thought you said he did marry her?’
‘I heard he was going to—that’s all, going to make
another attempt, after putting it off once or twice.… As far
as they themselves are concerned they are the only two in
the show. I should be ashamed of making myself so silly if I
were he!’
‘I don’t see as how there’s anything remarkable in their
behaviour. I should never have noticed their being in love, if
you hadn’t said so.’
 ‘You never see anything,’ she rejoined. Nevertheless
Cartlett’s view of the lovers’ or married pair’s conduct was
undoubtedly that of the general crowd, whose attention
seemed to be in no way attracted by what Arabella’s
sharpened vision discerned.
‘He’s charmed by her as if she were some fairy!’
continued Arabella. ‘See how he looks round at her, and lets
his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don’t
care for him quite so much as he does for her. She’s not a
particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though
she cares for him pretty middling29 much—as much as she’s
able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to
try—which he’s too simple to do. There—now they are going
across to the cart-horse sheds. Come along.’
‘I don’t want to see the cart-horses. It is no business of
ours to follow these two. If we have come to see the show
let us see it in our own way, as they do in theirs.’
‘Well—suppose we agree to meet somewhere in an hour’s
time—say at that refreshment tent over there, and go about
independent? Then you can look at what you choose to, and
so can I.’
Cartlett was not loth to agree to this, and they parted—he
proceeding to the shed where malting processes were being
exhibited, and Arabella in the direction taken by Jude and
Sue. Before, however, she had regained their wake a
laughing face met her own, and she was confronted by
Anny, the friend of her girlhood.
Anny had burst out in hearty laughter at the mere fact of
the chance rencounter. ‘I am still living down there,’ she
said, as soon as she was composed. ‘I am soon going to be
married, but my intended couldn’t come up here to-day. But
there’s lots of us come by excursion, though I’ve lost the
rest of ’em for the present.’
‘Have you met Jude and his young woman, or wife, or
whatever she is? I saw ’em by now.’
‘No. Not a glimpse of un for years!’
 ‘Well, they are close by here somewhere. Yes—there they
are—by that grey horse!’
‘O, that’s his present young woman—wife did you say?
Has he married again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s pretty, isn’t she!’
‘Yes—nothing to complain of; or jump at. Not much to
depend on, though; a slim, fidgety little thing like that.’
‘He’s a nice-looking chap, too! You ought to ha’ stuck to
un, Arabella.’
‘I don’t know but I ought,’ murmured she.
Anny laughed. ‘That’s you, Arabella! Always wanting
another man than your own.’
‘Well, and what woman don’t I should like to know? As for
that body with him—she don’t know what love is—at least
what I call love! I can see in her face she don’t.’
‘And perhaps, Abby dear, you don’t know what she calls
love.’
‘I’m sure I don’t wish to! … Ah—they are making for the
Art Department. I should like to see some pictures myself.
Suppose we go that way?—Why, if all Wessex isn’t here, I
verily believe! There’s Dr. Vilbert. Haven’t seen him for
years, and he’s not looking a day older than when I used to
know him. How do you do, Physician? I was just saying that
you don’t look a day older than when you knew me as a
girl.’
‘Simply the result of taking my own pills regular, ma’am.
Only two and threepence a box—warranted efficacious by
the Government stamp. Now let me advise you to purchase
the same immunity from the ravages of Time by following
my example? Only two-and-three.’
The physician had produced a box from his waistcoat
pocket, and Arabella was induced to make the purchase.
‘At the same time,’ continued he, when the pills were paid
for, ‘you have the advantage of me, Mrs.—Surely not Mrs.
Fawley, once Miss Donn, of the vicinity of Marygreen?’
 ‘Yes. But Mrs. Cartlett now.’
‘Ah—you lost him, then? Promising young fellow! A pupil
of mine, you know. I taught him the dead languages. And
believe me, he soon knew nearly as much as I.’
‘I lost him; but not as you think,’ said Arabella drily. ‘The
lawyers untied us. There he is, look, alive and lusty; along
with that young woman, entering the Art exhibition.’
‘Ah—dear me! Fond of her, apparently.’
‘They say they are cousins.’
‘Cousinship is a great convenience to their feelings, I
should say?’
‘Yes. So her husband thought, no doubt, when he divorced
her.… Shall we look at the pictures, too?’
The trio followed across the green and entered. Jude and
Sue, with the child, unaware of the interest they were
exciting, had gone up to a model at one end of the building,
which they regarded with considerable attention for a long
while before they went on. Arabella and her friends came to
it in due course, and the inscription it bore was; ‘Model of
Cardinal College, Christminster; by J. Fawley and S. F. M.
Bridehead.’
‘Admiring their own work, said Arabella. ‘How like Jude—
always thinking of Colleges and Christminster, instead of
attending to his business!’
They glanced cursorily at the pictures, and proceeded to
the bandstand. When they had stood a little while listening
to the music of the military performers, Jude, Sue, and the
child came up on the other side. Arabella did not care if they
should recognize her; but they were too deeply absorbed in
their own lives, as translated into emotion by the military
band, to perceive her under her beaded veil. She walked
round the outside of the listening throng, passing behind the
lovers, whose movements had an unexpected fascination
for her to-day. Scrutinizing them narrowly from the rear she
noticed that Jude’s hand sought Sue’s as they stood, the two
standing close together so as to conceal, as they supposed,
this tacit expression of their mutual responsiveness.
‘Silly fools—like two children!’ Arabella whispered to
herself morosely, as she rejoined her companions, with
whom she preserved a preoccupied silence.
Anny meanwhile had jokingly remarked to Vilbert on
Arabella’s hankering interest in her first husband.
‘Now,’ said the physician to Arabella, apart; ‘do you want
anything such as this, Mrs. Cartlett? It is not compounded
out of my regular pharmacopoeia,30 but I am sometimes
asked for such a thing.’ He produced a small phial of clear
liquid. ‘A love-philtre, such as was used by the Ancients with
great effect. I found it out by study of their writings, and
have never known it to fail.’
‘What is it made of?’ asked Arabella curiously.
‘Well—a distillation of the juices of doves’ hearts—
otherwise pigeons’—is one of the ingredients. It took nearly
a hundred hearts to produce that small bottle full.’
‘How do you get pigeons enough?’
‘To tell a secret, I get a piece of rock-salt, of which
pigeons are inordinately fond, and place it in a dovecote on
my roof. In a few hours the birds come to it from all points of
the compass—east, west, north, and south—and thus I
secure as many as I require. You use the liquid by contriving
that the desired man shall take about ten drops of it in his
drink. But remember, all this is told you because I gather
from your questions that you mean to be a purchaser. You
must keep faith with me?’
‘Very well—I don’t mind a bottle—to give some friend or
other to try it on her young man.’ She produced five
shillings, the price asked, and slipped the phial in her
capacious bosom. Saying presently that she was due at an
appointment with her husband she sauntered away towards
the refreshment bar, Jude, his companion, and the child
having gone on to the horticultural tent, where Arabella
caught a glimpse of them standing before a group of roses
in bloom.
She waited a few minutes observing them, and then
proceeded to join her spouse with no very amiable
sentiments. She found him seated on a stool by the bar,
talking to one of the gaily dressed maids who had served
him with spirits.
‘I should think you had enough of this business at home!’
Arabella remarked gloomily. ‘Surely you didn’t come fifty
miles from your own bar to stick in another? Come, take me
round the show, as other men do their wives! Dammy, one
would think you were a young bachelor, with nobody to look
after but yourself!’
‘But we agreed to meet here; and what could I do but
wait?’
‘Well, now we have met, come along,’ she returned, ready
to quarrel with the sun for shining on her. And they left the
tent together, this pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the
antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the average husband
and wife of Christendom.
In the meantime the more exceptional couple and the boy
still lingered in the pavilion of flowers—an enchanted palace
to their appreciative taste—Sue’s usually pale cheeks
reflecting the pink of the tinted roses at which she gazed;
for the gay sights, the air, the music, and the excitement of
a day’s outing with Jude, had quickened her blood and made
her eyes sparkle with vivacity. She adored roses, and what
Arabella had witnessed was Sue detaining Jude almost
against his will while she learnt the names of this variety
and that, and put her face within an inch of their blooms to
smell them.
‘I should like to push my face quite into them—the dears!’
she had said. ‘But I suppose it is against the rules to touch
them—isn’t it, Jude?’
‘Yes, you baby,’ said he: and then playfully gave her a
little push, so that her nose went among the petals.
 “The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was
my husband’s fault!’
Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told
so much to Arabella.
‘Happy?’ he murmured.
She nodded.
‘Why? Because you have come to the great Wessex
Agricultural Show—or because we have come?’
‘You are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of
absurdities. Because I am improving my mind, of course, by
seeing all these steamploughs, and threshing-machines, and
chaff-cutters, and cows, and pigs, and sheep.’
Jude was quite content with a baffle31 from his ever
evasive companion. But when he had forgotten that he had
put the question, and because he no longer wished for an
answer, she went on: ‘I feel that we have returned to Greek
joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness and
sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-five centuries have
taught the race since their time, as one of your
Christminster luminaries32 says.… There is one immediate
shadow, however,—only one.’ And she looked at the aged
child, whom, though they had taken him to everything likely
to attract a young intelligence, they had utterly failed to
interest.
He knew what they were saying and thinking. ‘I am very,
very sorry, father and mother,’ he said. ‘But please don’t
mind!—I can’t help it. I should like the flowers very very
much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a
few days!’

V–6
The unnoticed lives that the pair had hitherto led began,
from the day of the suspended wedding onwards, to be
observed and discussed by other persons than Arabella. The
society of Spring Street and the neighbourhood generally
did not understand, and probably could not have been made
to understand, Sue and Jude’s private minds, emotions,
positions, and fears. The curious facts of a child coming to
them unexpectedly, who called Jude father, and Sue mother,
and a hitch in a marriage ceremony intended for quietness
to be performed at a registrar’s office, together with
rumours of the undefended cases in the law-courts, bore
only one translation to plain minds.
Little Time—for though he was formally turned into ‘Jude,’
the apt nickname stuck to him—would come home from
school in the evening, and repeat inquiries and remarks that
had been made to him by the other boys; and cause Sue,
and Jude when he heard them, a great deal of pain and
sadness.
The result was that shortly after the attempt at the
registrar’s the pair went off—to London it was believed—for
several days, hiring somebody to look to the boy. When they
came back they let it be understood indirectly, and with
total indifference and weariness of mien, that they were
legally married at last. Sue, who had previously been called
Mrs. Bridehead, now openly adopted the name of Mrs.
Fawley. Her dull, cowed, and listless manner for days
seemed to substantiate all this.
But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so
secretly to do the business, kept up much of the mystery of
their lives; and they found that they made not such
advances with their neighbours as they had expected to do
thereby. A living mystery was not much less interesting than
a dead scandal.
The baker’s lad and the grocer’s boy, who at first had
used to lift their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to
execute their errands, in these days no longer took the
trouble to render her that homage, and the neighbouring
artizans’ wives looked straight along the pavement when
they encountered her.
 Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive
atmosphere began to encircle their souls, particularly after
their excursion to the Show, as if that visit had brought
some evil influence to bear on them. And their
temperaments were precisely of a kind to suffer from this
atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous
and open statements. Their apparent attempt at reparation
had come too late to be effective.
The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or
three months later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that
he would have to return to journey-work again, a course all
the more unfortunate just now, in that he had not as yet
cleared off the debt he had unavoidably incurred in the
payment of the law-costs of the previous year.
One evening he sat down to share the common meal with
Sue and the child as usual. ‘I am thinking,’ he said to her,
‘that I’ll hold on here no longer. The life suits us, certainly;
but if we could get away to a place where we are unknown,
we should be lighter hearted, and have a better chance. And
so I am afraid we must break it up here, however awkward
for you, poor dear!’
Sue was always much affected at a picture of herself as
an object of pity, and she saddened.
‘Well—I am not sorry,’ said she presently. ‘I am much
depressed by the way they look at me here. And you have
been keeping on this house and furniture entirely for me
and the boy! You don’t want it yourself, and the expense is
unnecessary. But whatever we do, wherever we go, you
won’t take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not let him
go now! The cloud upon his young mind makes him so
pathetic to me; I do hope to lift it some day! And he loves
me so. You won’t take him away from me?’
‘Certainly I won’t, dear little girl! We’ll get nice lodgings,
wherever we go. I shall be moving about probably—getting
a job here and a job there.’
 ‘I shall do something too, of course, till—till—Well, now I
can’t be useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my
hand to something else.’
‘Don’t hurry about getting employment,’ he said
regretfully. ‘I don’t want you to do that. I wish you wouldn’t,
Sue. The boy and yourself are enough for you to attend to.’
There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it. Sue
could hear the conversation:
‘Is Mr. Fawley at home?.… Biles and Willis the building
contractors sent me to know if you’ll undertake the
relettering of the Ten Commandments in a little church
they’ve been restoring lately in the country near here.’
Jude reflected, and said he could undertake it.
‘It is not a very artistic job,’ continued the messenger.
‘The clergyman is a very old-fashioned chap, and he has
refused to let anything more be done to the church than
cleaning and repairing.’
‘Excellent old man!’ said Sue to herself, who was
sentimentally opposed to the horrors of over-restoration.
‘The Ten Commandments are fixed to the east end,’ the
messenger went on, ‘and they want doing up with the rest
of the wall there, since he won’t have them carted off as old
materials belonging to the contractor, in the usual way of
the trade.’
A bargain as to terms was struck, and Jude came indoors.
‘There, you see,’ he said cheerfully. ‘One more job yet, at
any rate, and you can help in it—at least you can try. We
shall have all the church to ourselves, as the rest of the
work is finished.’
Next day Jude went out to the church, which was only two
miles off. He found that what the contractor’s clerk had said
was true. The tables of the Jewish law towered sternly over
the utensils of Christian grace,33 as the chief ornament of
the chancel end, in the fine dry style of the last century. And
as their framework was constructed of ornamental plaster
they could not be taken down for repair. A portion, crumbled
by damp, required renewal; and when this had been done,
and the whole cleansed, he began to renew the lettering. On
the second morning Sue came to see what assistance she
could render, and also because they liked to be together.
The silence and emptiness of the building gave her
confidence, and, standing on a safe low platform erected by
Jude, which she was nevertheless timid at mounting, she
began painting in the letters of the first Table34 while he set
about mending a portion of the second. She was quite
pleased at her powers; she had acquired them in the days
she painted illumined texts for the church-fitting shop at
Christminster. Nobody seemed likely to disturb them; and
the pleasant twitter of birds, and rustle of October leafage,
came in through an open window, and mingled with their
talk.
They were not, however, to be left thus snug and peaceful
for long. About half-past twelve there came footsteps on the
gravel without. The old vicar and his churchwarden entered,
and, coming up to see what was being done, seemed
surprised to discover that a young woman was assisting.
They passed on into an aisle, at which time the door again
opened, and another figure entered—a small one, that of
little Time, who was crying. Sue had told him where he
might find her between school-hours, if he wished. She
came down from her perch, and said, ‘What’s the matter,
my dear?’
‘I couldn’t stay to eat my dinner in school, because they
said—’ He described how some boys had taunted him about
his nominal mother, and Sue, grieved, expressed her
indignation to Jude aloft. The child went into the churchyard,
and Sue returned to her work. Meanwhile the door had
opened again, and there shuffled in with a businesslike air
the white-aproned woman who cleaned the church. Sue
recognized her as one who had friends in Spring Street,
whom she visited. The church-cleaner looked at Sue, gaped,
and lifted her hands; she had evidently recognized Jude’s
companion as the latter had recognized her. Next came two
ladies, and after talking to the charwoman they also moved
forward, and as Sue stood reaching upward, watched her
hand tracing the letters, and critically regarded her person
in relief against the white wall, till she grew so nervous that
she trembled visibly.
They went back to where the others were standing,
talking in undertones: and one said—Sue could not hear
which—‘She’s his wife, I suppose?’
‘Some say Yes: some say No,’ was the reply from the
charwoman.
‘Not? Then she ought to be, or somebody’s—that’s very
clear!’
‘They’ve only been married a very few weeks, whether or
no.’
‘A strange pair to be painting the Two Tables! I wonder
Biles and Willis could think of such a thing as hiring those!’
The churchwarden supposed that Biles and Willis knew of
nothing wrong, and then the other, who had been talking to
the old woman, explained what she meant by calling them
strange people.
The probable drift of the subdued conversation which
followed was made plain by the churchwarden breaking into
an anecdote, in a voice that everybody in the church could
hear, though obviously suggested by the present situation:
‘Well, now, it is a curious thing, but my grandfather told
me a strange tale of a most immoral case that happened at
the painting of the Commandments in a church out by
Gaymead—which is quite within a walk of this one. In them
days Commandments were mostly done in gilt letters on a
black ground, and that’s how they were out where I say,
before the owld church was rebuilded. It must have been
somewhere about a hundred years ago that them
Commandments wanted doing up, just as ours do here, and
they had to get men from Aldbrickham to do ’em. Now they
wished to get the job finished by a particular Sunday, so the
men had to work late Saturday night, against their will, for
over-time was not paid then as ’tis now. There was no true
religion in the country at that date, neither among pa’sons,
clerks, nor people, and to keep the men up to their work the
vicar had to let ’em have plenty of drink during the
afternoon. As evening drawed on they sent for some more
themselves; rum, by all account. It got later and later, and
they got more and more fuddled, till at last they went a-
putting their rum-bottle and rummers upon the Communion
table, and drawed up a trestle or two, and sate round
comfortable, and poured out again right hearty bumpers.35
No sooner had they tossed off their glasses than, so the
story goes, they fell down senseless, one and all. How long
they bode so they didn’t know, but when they came to
themselves there was a terrible thunderstorm a-raging, and
they seemed to see in the gloom a dark figure with very thin
legs and a curious voot,36 a-standing on the ladder, and
finishing their work. When it got daylight they could see that
the work was really finished, and couldn’t at all mind
finishing it themselves. They went home, and the next thing
they heard was that a great scandal had been caused in the
church that Sunday morning, for when the people came and
service began, all saw that the Ten Commandments wez
painted with the “Nots” left out. Decent people wouldn’t
attend service there for a long time, and the Bishop had to
be sent for to re-consecrate the church. That’s the tradition
as I used to hear it as a child. You must take it for what it is
wo’th, but this case to-day has reminded me o’t, as I say.’
The visitors gave one more glance, as if to see whether
Jude and Sue had left the Nots out likewise, and then
severally left the church, even the old woman at last. Sue
and Jude, who had not stopped working, sent back the child
to school, and remained without speaking; till, looking at her
narrowly, he found she had been crying silently.
‘Never mind, comrade!’ he said. ‘I know what it is!’
 ‘I can’t bear that they, and everybody, should think
people wicked because they may have chosen to live their
own way! It is really these opinions that make the best
intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!’
‘Never be cast down! It was only a funny story.’
‘Ah, but we suggested it! I am afraid I have done you
mischief, Jude, instead of helping you by coming!’
To have suggested such a story was certainly not very
exhilarating, in a serious view of their position. However, in
a few minutes Sue seemed to see that their position this
morning had a ludicrous side, and wiping her eyes she
laughed.
‘It is droll, after all,’ she said, ‘that we two, of all people,
with our queer history, should happen to be here painting
the Ten Commandments! You a reprobate, and I—in my
condition.… O dear!’ … And with her hand over her eyes she
laughed again silently and intermittently, till she was quite
weak.
‘That’s better,’ said Jude gaily. ‘Now we are right again,
aren’t we, little girl!’
‘O but it is serious, all the same!’ she sighed as she took
up the brush and righted herself. ‘But do you see they don’t
think we are married? They won’t believe it! It is
extraordinary!’
‘I don’t care whether they think so or not,’ said Jude. ‘I
shan’t take any more trouble to make them.’
They sat down to lunch—which they had brought with
them not to hinder time—and having eaten it were about to
set to work anew when a man entered the church, and Jude
recognized in him the contractor Willis. He beckoned to
Jude, and spoke to him apart.
‘Here—I’ve just had a complaint about this,’ he said, with
rather breathless awkwardness. ‘I don’t wish to go into the
matter—as of course I didn’t know what was going on—but I
am afraid I must ask you and her to leave off, and let
somebody else finish this! It is best, to avoid all
unpleasantness. I’ll pay you for the week, all the same.’
Jude was too independent to make any fuss; and the
contractor paid him, and left. Jude picked up his tools, and
Sue cleansed her brush. Then their eyes met.
‘How could we be so simple as to suppose we might do
this!’ said she, dropping to her tragic note, ‘Of course we
ought not—I ought not—to have come!’
‘I had no idea that anybody was going to intrude into such
a lonely place and see us!’ Jude returned. ‘Well, it can’t be
helped, dear; and of course I wouldn’t wish to injure Willis’s
trade-connection by staying.’ They sat down passively for a
few minutes, proceeded out of the church, and overtaking
the boy pursued their thoughtful way to Aldbrickham.
Fawley had still a pretty zeal in the cause of education,
and, as was natural with his experiences, he was active in
furthering ‘equality of opportunity’ by any humble means
open to him. He had joined an Artizans’ Mutual
Improvement Society established in the town about the time
of his arrival there; its members being young men of all
creeds and denominations, including Churchmen,
Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, Positivists, and
others—Agnostics37 had scarcely been heard of at this time
—their one common wish to enlarge their minds forming a
sufficiently close bond of union. The subscription was small,
and the room homely and Jude’s activity, uncustomary
acquirements, and above all, singular intuition on what to
read and how to set about it—begotten of his years of
struggle against malignant stars—had led to his being
placed on the committee.
A few evenings after his dismissal from the church
repairs, and before he had obtained any more work to do,
he went to attend a meeting of the aforesaid committee. It
was late when he arrived: all the others had come, and as
he entered they looked dubiously at him, and hardly uttered
a word of greeting. He guessed that something bearing on
himself had been either discussed or mooted. Some
ordinary business was transacted, and it was disclosed that
the number of subscriptions had shown a sudden falling off
for that quarter. One member—a really well-meaning and
upright man—began speaking in enigmas about certain
possible causes: that it behoved them to look well into their
constitution; for if the committee were not respected, and
had not at least, in their differences, a common standard of
conduct, they would bring the institution to the ground.
Nothing further was said in Jude’s presence, but he knew
what this meant; and turning to the table wrote a note
resigning his office there and then.
Thus the supersensitive couple were more and more
impelled to go away. And then bills were sent in, and the
question arose, what could Jude do with his great-aunt’s
heavy old furniture, if he left the town to travel he knew not
whither? This, and the necessity of ready money, compelled
him to decide on an auction, much as he would have
preferred to keep the venerable goods.
The day of the sale came on; and Sue for the last time
cooked her own, the child’s, and Jude’s breakfast in the little
house he had furnished. It chanced to be a wet day;
moreover Sue was unwell, and not wishing to desert her
poor Jude in such gloomy circumstances, for he was
compelled to stay awhile, she acted on the suggestion of
the auctioneer’s man, and ensconced herself in an upper
room, which could be emptied of its effects, and so kept
closed to the bidders. Here Jude discovered her; and with
the child, and their few trunks, baskets, and bundles, and
two chairs and a table that were not in the sale, the two sat
in meditative talk.
Footsteps began stamping up and down the bare stairs,
the comers inspecting the goods, some of which were of so
quaint and ancient a make as to acquire an adventitious
value as art. Their door was tried once or twice, and to
guard themselves against intrusion Jude wrote ‘Private’ on a
scrap of paper, and stuck it upon the panel.
They soon found that, instead of the furniture, their own
personal histories and past conduct began to be discussed
to an unexpected and intolerable extent by the intending
bidders. It was not till now that they really discovered what
a fools’ paradise of supposed unrecognition they had been
living in of late. Sue silently took her companion’s hand, and
with eyes on each other they heard these passing remarks—
the quaint and mysterious personality of Father Time being
a subject which formed a large ingredient in the hints and
innuendoes. At length the auction began in the room below,
whence they could hear each familiar article knocked down,
the highly prized ones cheaply, the unconsidered at an
unexpected price.
‘People don’t understand us,’ he sighed heavily. ‘I am glad
we have decided to go.’
‘The question is, where to?’
‘It ought to be to London. There one can live as one
chooses.’
‘No—not London, dear! I know it well. We should be
unhappy there.’
‘Why?’
‘Can’t you think?’
‘Because Arabella is there?’
‘That’s the chief reason.’
‘But in the country I shall always be uneasy lest there
should be some more of our late experience. And I don’t
care to lessen it by explaining, for one thing, all about the
boy’s history. To cut him off from his past. I have determined
to keep silence. I am sickened of ecclesiastical work now;
and I shouldn’t like to accept it, if offered me!’
‘You ought to have learnt Classic. Gothic is barbaric art,
after all. Pugin was wrong, and Wren38 was right. Remember
the interior of Christminster Cathedral—almost the first
place in which we looked in each other’s faces. Under the
picturesqueness of those Norman details one can see the
grotesque childishness of uncouth people trying to imitate
the vanished Roman forms, remembered by dim tradition
only.’
‘Yes—you have half converted me to that view by what
you have said before. But one can work, and despise what
one does. I must do something, if not church-gothic.’
‘I wish we could both follow an occupation in which
personal circumstances don’t count,’ she said, smiling up
wistfully. ‘I am as disqualified for teaching as you are for
ecclesiastical art. You must fall back upon railway stations,
bridges, theatres, music-halls, hotels—everything that has
no connection with conduct.’
‘I am not skilled in those.… I ought to take to bread-
baking. I grew up in the baking business with aunt, you
know. But even a baker must be conventional, to get
customers.’
‘Unless he keeps a cake and gingerbread stall at markets
and fairs, where people are gloriously indifferent to
everything except the quality of the goods.’
Their thoughts were diverted by the voice of the
auctioneer: ‘Now this antique oak settle—a unique example
of old English furniture, worthy the attention of all
collectors!’
‘That was my great-grandfather’s,’ said Jude. ‘I wish we
could have kept the poor old thing!’
One by one the articles went, and the afternoon passed
away. Jude and the other two were getting tired and hungry,
but after the conversation they had heard they were shy of
going out while the purchasers were in their line of retreat.
However, the later lots drew on, and it became necessary to
emerge into the rain soon, to take on Sue’s things to their
temporary lodging.
‘Now the next lot: two pairs of pigeons, all alive and
plump—a nice pie for somebody for next Sunday’s dinner!’
 The impending sale of these birds had been the most
trying suspense of the whole afternoon. They were Sue’s
pets, and when it was found that they could not possibly be
kept, more sadness was caused than by parting from all the
furniture. Sue tried to think away her tears as she heard the
trifling sum that her dears were deemed to be worth
advanced by small stages to the price at which they were
finally knocked down. The purchaser was a neighbouring
poulterer, and they were unquestionably doomed to die
before the next market day.
Noting her dissembled distress Jude kissed her, and said it
was time to go and see if the lodgings were ready. He would
go on with the boy, and fetch her soon.
When she was left alone she waited patiently, but Jude
did not come back. At last she started, the coast being
clear, and on passing the poulterer’s shop, not far off, she
saw her pigeons in a hamper by the door. An emotion at
sight of them, assisted by the growing dusk of evening,
caused her to act on impulse, and first looking around her
quickly, she pulled out the peg which fastened down the
cover, and went on. The cover was lifted from within, and
the pigeons flew away with a clatter that brought the
chagrined poulterer cursing and swearing to the door.
Sue reached the lodging trembling, and found Jude and
the boy making it comfortable for her. ‘Do the buyers pay
before they bring away the things;’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Yes, I think. Why?’
‘Because, then, I’ve done such a wicked thing!’ And she
explained, in bitter contrition.
‘I shall have to pay the poulterer for them, if he doesn’t
catch them,’ said Jude. ‘But never mind. Don’t fret about it,
dear.’
‘It was so foolish of me! O why should Nature’s law be
mutual butchery!’
‘Is it so, mother?’ asked the boy intently.
‘Yes!’ said Sue vehemently.
 ‘Well, they must take their chance, now, poor things,’ said
Jude. ‘As soon as the sale-account is wound up, and our bills
paid, we go.’
‘Where do we go to?’ asked Time, in suspense.
‘We must sail under sealed orders, that nobody may trace
us.… We mustn’t go to Alfredston, or to Melchester, or to
Shaston, or to Christminster. Apart from those we may go
anywhere.’
‘Why mustn’t we go there, father?’
‘Because of a cloud that has gathered over us; though
“we have wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no
man!”39 Though perhaps we have “done that which was
right in our own eyes.”40

V–7
From that week Jude Fawley and Sue walked no more in the
town of Aldbrickham.
Whither they had gone nobody knew, chiefly because
nobody cared to know. Any one sufficiently curious to trace
the steps of such an obscure pair might have discovered
without great trouble that they had taken advantage of his
adaptive craftsmanship to enter on a shifting, almost
nomadic, life, which was not without its pleasantness for a
time.
Whenever Jude heard of freestone work to be done,
thither he went, choosing by preference places remote from
his old haunts and Sue’s. He laboured at a job, long or
briefly, till it was finished; and then moved on.
Two whole years and a half passed thus. Sometimes he
might have been found shaping the mullions of a country
mansion, sometimes setting the parapet of a town-hall,
sometimes ashlaring41 an hotel at Sandbourne, sometimes a
museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down as
Exonbury, sometimes at Stoke-Barehills. Later still he was at
Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles
south of Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the
village where he was known; for he had a sensitive dread of
being questioned as to his life and fortunes by those who
had been acquainted with him during his ardent young
manhood of study and promise, and his brief and unhappy
married life at that time.
At some of these places he would be detained for months,
at others only a few weeks. His curious and sudden
antipathy to ecclesiastical work, both episcopal and
nonconformist, which had risen in him when suffering under
a smarting sense of misconception, remained with him in
cold blood, less from any fear of renewed censure than from
an ultra-conscientiousness which would not allow him to
seek a living out of those who would disapprove of his ways;
also, too, from a sense of inconsistency between his former
dogmas and his present practice, hardly a shred of the
beliefs with which he had first gone up to Christminster now
remaining with him. He was mentally approaching the
position which Sue had occupied when he first met her.
On a Saturday evening in May, nearly three years after
Arabella’s recognition of Sue and himself at the Agricultural
Show, some of those who there encountered each other met
again.
It was the spring fair at Kennetbridge, and, though this
ancient trade-meeting had much dwindled from its
dimensions of former times, the long straight street of the
borough presented a lively scene about midday. At this hour
a light trap, among other vehicles, was driven into the town
by the north road, and up to the door of a temperance inn.
There alighted two women, one the driver, an ordinary
country person, the other a finely built figure in the deep
mourning of a widow. Her sombre suit, of pronounced cut,
caused her to appear a little out of place in the medley and
bustle of a provincial fair.
‘I will just find out where it is, Anny,’ said the widow-lady
to her companion, when the horse and cart had been taken
by a man who came forward: ‘and then I’ll come back, and
meet you here; and we’ll go in and have something to eat
and drink. I begin to feel quite a sinking.’
‘With all my heart,’ said the other. ‘Though I would sooner
have put up at the Chequers or The Jack. You can’t get much
at these temperance houses.’
‘Now, don’t you give way to gluttonous desires, my child,’
said the woman in weeds42 reprovingly. ‘This is the proper
place. Very well: we’ll meet in half-an-hour, unless you come
with me to find out where the site of the new chapel is?’
‘I don’t care to. You can tell me.’
The companions then went their several ways, the one in
crape43 walking firmly along with a mien of disconnection
from her miscellaneous surroundings. Making inquiries she
came to a hoarding,44 within which were excavations
denoting the foundations of a building; and on the boards
without one or two large posters announcing that the
foundation-stone of the chapel about to be erected would be
laid that afternoon at three o’clock by a London preacher of
great popularity among his body.45
Having ascertained thus much the immensely weeded
widow retraced her steps, and gave herself leisure to
observe the movements of the fair. By and by her attention
was arrested by a little stall of cakes and gingerbreads,
standing between the more pretentious erections of trestles
and canvas. It was covered with an immaculate cloth, and
tended by a young woman apparently unused to the
business, she being accompanied by a boy with an
octogenarian face, who assisted her.
‘Upon my—senses!’ murmured the widow to herself. ‘His
wife Sue—if she is so!’ She drew nearer to the stall. ‘How do
you do, Mrs. Fawley?’ she said blandly.
Sue changed colour and recognized Arabella through the
crape veil.
‘How are you, Mrs. Cartlett?’ she said stiffly. And then
perceiving Arabella’s garb her voice grew sympathetic in
spite of herself. ‘What?—you have lost—’
‘My poor husband. Yes. He died suddenly, six weeks ago,
leaving me none too well off, though he was a kind husband
to me. But whatever profit there is in public-house keeping
goes to them that brew the liquors, and not to them that
retail ’em.… And you, my little old man! You don’t know me,
I expect?’
‘Yes, I do. You be the woman I thought wer my mother for
a bit, till I found you wasn’t,’ replied Father Time, who had
learned to use the Wessex tongue quite naturally by now.
‘All right. Never mind. I am a friend.’
‘Juey,’ said Sue suddenly, ‘go down to the station platform
with this tray—there’s another train coming in, I think.’
When he was gone Arabella continued: ‘He’ll never be a
beauty, will he, poor chap! Does he know I am his mother
really?’
‘No. He thinks there is some mystery about his parentage
—that’s all. Jude is going to tell him when he is a little older.’
‘But how do you come to be doing this? I am surprised.’
‘It is only a temporary occupation—a fancy of ours while
we are in a difficulty.’
‘Then you are living with him still?’
‘Yes.’
‘Married?’
‘Of course.’
‘Any children?’
‘Two.’
‘And another coming soon, I see.’
Sue writhed under the hard and direct questioning, and
her tender little mouth began to quiver.
‘Lord—I mean goodness gracious—what is there to cry
about? Some folks would be proud enough!’
‘It is not that I am ashamed—not as you think! But it
seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the
world—so presumptuous—that I question my right to do it
sometimes!’
 ‘Take it easy, my dear.… But you don’t tell me why you do
such a thing as this? Jude used to be a proud sort of chap—
above any business almost, leave alone keeping a
standing.’46
‘Perhaps my husband has altered a little since then. I am
sure he is not proud now!’ And Sue’s lips quivered again. ‘I
am doing this because he caught a chill early in the year
while putting up some stone-work of a music-hall, at
Quartershot, which he had to do in the rain, the work having
to be executed by a fixed day. He is better than he was; but
it has been a long, weary time! We have had an old widow
friend with us to help us through it; but she’s leaving soon.’
‘Well, I am respectable too, thank God, and of a serious
way of thinking since my loss. Why did you choose to sell
gingerbreads?’
‘That’s a pure accident. He was brought up to the baking
business, and it occurred to him to try his hand at these,
which he can make without coming out of doors. We call
them Christminster cakes. They are a great success.’
‘I never saw any like ’em. Why, they are windows and
towers, and pinnacles! And upon my word they are very
nice.’ She had helped herself, and was unceremoniously
munching one of the cakes.
‘Yes. They are reminiscences of the Christminster
Colleges. Traceried windows, and cloisters, you see. It was a
whim of his to do them in pastry.’
‘Still harping on Christminster—even in his cakes!’
laughed Arabella. ‘Just like Jude. A ruling passion. What a
queer fellow he is, and always will be!’
Sue sighed, and she looked her distress at hearing him
criticized.
‘Don’t you think he is? Come now; you do, though you are
so fond of him!’
‘Of course Christminster is a sort of fixed vision with him,
which I suppose he’ll never be cured of believing in. He still
thinks it is a great centre of high and fearless thought,
instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters
whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.’
Arabella was quizzing47 Sue with more regard of how she
was speaking than of what she was saying. ‘How odd to
hear a woman selling cakes talk like that!’ she said. ‘Why
don’t you go back to school-keeping?’
Sue shook her head. They won’t have me.’
‘Because of the divorce, I suppose?’
‘That and other things. And there is no reason to wish it.
We gave up all ambition, and were never so happy in our
lives till his illness came.’
‘Where are you living?’
‘I don’t care to say.’
‘Here in Kennetbridge?’
Sue’s manner showed Arabella that her random guess
was right.
‘Here comes the boy back again,’ continued Arabella. ‘My
boy and Jude’s!’
Sue’s eyes darted a spark. ‘You needn’t throw that in my
face!’ she cried.
‘Very well—though I half feel as if I should like to have him
with me! … But Lord, I don’t want to take him from ’ee—
ever I should sin to speak so profane—though I should think
you must have enough of your own! He’s in very good
hands, that I know; and I am not the woman to find fault
with what the Lord has ordained. I’ve reached a more
resigned frame of mind.’
‘Indeed! I wish I had been able to do so.’
‘You should try,’ replied the widow, from the serene
heights of a soul conscious not only of spiritual but of social
superiority. ‘I make no boast of my awakening, but I’m not
what I was. After Cartlett’s death I was passing the chapel in
the street next ours, and went into it for shelter from a
shower of rain. I felt a need of some sort of support under
my loss, and, as ’twas righter than gin, I took to going there
regular, and found it a great comfort. But I’ve left London
now, you know, and at present I am living at Alfredston, with
my friend Anny, to be near my own old country. I’m not
come here to the fair to-day. There’s to be the foundation-
stone of a new chapel laid this afternoon by a popular
London preacher, and I drove over with Anny. Now I must go
back to meet her.’
Then Arabella wished Sue good-bye, and went on.

V–8
In the afternoon Sue and the other people bustling about
Kennet-bridge fair could hear singing inside the placarded
hoarding further down the street. Those who peeped
through the opening saw a crowd of persons in broadcloth,48
with hymn-books in their hands, standing round the
excavations for the new chapel-walls. Arabella Cartlett and
her weeds stood among them. She had a clear, powerful
voice, which could be distinctly heard with the rest, rising
and falling to the tune, her inflated bosom being also seen
doing likewise.
It was two hours later on the same day that Anny and
Mrs. Cartlett having had tea at the Temperance hotel,
started on their return journey across the high and open
country which stretches between Kennetbridge and
Alfredston. Arabella was in a thoughtful mood; but her
thoughts were not of the new chapel, as Anny at first
surmised.
‘No—it is something else,’ at last said Arabella sullenly. ‘I
came here to-day never thinking of anybody but poor
Cartlett, or of anything but spreading the Gospel by means
of this new tabernacle49 they’ve begun this afternoon. But
something has happened to turn my mind another way
quite. Anny, I’ve heard of un again, and I’ve seen her!’
‘Who?’
‘I’ve heard of Jude and I’ve seen his wife. And ever since,
do what I will, and though I sung the hymns wi’ all my
strength, I have not been able to help thinking about ’n;
which I’ve no right to do as a chapel member.’
‘Can’t ye fix your mind upon what was said by the London
preacher to-day, and try to get rid of your wandering fancies
that way?’
‘I do. But my wicked heart will ramble off in spite of
myself!’
‘Well—I know what it is to have a wanton mind o’ my own,
too! If you on’y knew what I do dream sometimes o’ nights
quite against my wishes, you’d say I had my struggles!’
(Anny, too, had grown rather serious of late, her lover
having jilted her.)
‘What shall I do about it?’ urged Arabella morbidly.
‘You could take a lock of your late-lost husband’s hair, and
have it made into a mourning brooch, and look at it every
hour of the day.’
‘I haven’t a morsel!—and if I had ’twould be no good.…
After all that’s said about the comforts of this religion, I wish
I had Jude back again!’
‘You must fight valiant against the feeling, since he’s
another’s. And I’ve heard that another good thing for it,
when it afflicts volupshious widows, is to go to your
husband’s grave in the dusk of evening, and stand a long
while a-bowed down.’
‘Pooh! I know as well as you what I should do; only I don’t
do it!’
They drove in silence along the straight road till they were
within the horizon of Marygreen, which lay not far to the left
of their route. They came to the junction of the highway and
the cross-lane leading to that village, whose church-tower
could be seen athwart the hollow. When they got yet further
on, and were passing the lonely house in which Arabella and
Jude had lived during the first months of their marriage, and
where the pig-killing had taken place, she could control
herself no longer.
 ‘He’s more mine than hers!’ she burst out. ‘What right has
she to him. I should like to know! I’d take him from her if I
could!’
‘Fie, Abby! And your husband only six weeks gone! Pray
against it!’
‘Be damned if I do! Feelings are feelings! I won’t be a
creeping hypocrite any longer—so there!’
Arabella had hastily drawn from her pocket a bundle of
tracts which she had brought with her to distribute at the
fair, and of which she had given away several. As she spoke
she flung the whole remainder of the packet into the hedge.
‘I’ve tried that sort o’ physic and have failed wi’ it. I must be
as I was born!’
‘Hush! You be excited, dear! Now you come along home
quiet, and have a cup of tea, and don’t let us talk about un
no more. We won’t come out this road again, as it leads to
where he is, because it inflames ’ee so. You’ll be all right
again soon.’
Arabella did calm herself down by degrees; and they
crossed the Ridge-way. When they began to descend the
long, straight hill, they saw plodding along in front of them
an elderly man of spare stature and thoughtful gait. In his
hand he carried a basket; and there was a touch of
slovenliness in his attire, together with that indefinable
something in his whole appearance which suggested one
who was his own housekeeper, purveyor, confidant, and
friend, through possessing nobody else at all in the world to
act in those capacities for him. The remainder of the journey
was down-hill, and guessing him to be going to Alfredston
they offered him a lift, which he accepted.
Arabella looked at him, and looked again, till at length she
spoke. ‘If I don’t mistake I am talking to Mr. Phillotson?’
The wayfarer faced round and regarded her in turn. ‘Yes;
my name is Phillotson,’ he said. ‘But I don’t recognize you,
ma’am.’
 ‘I remember you well enough when you used to be
schoolmaster out at Marygreen, and I one of your scholars. I
used to walk up there from Cresscombe every day, because
we had only a mistress down at our place, and you taught
better. But you wouldn’t remember me as I should you?—
Arabella Donn.’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said politely, ‘I don’t recall the
name. And I should hardly recognize in your present portly
self the slim school child no doubt you were then.’
‘Well, I always had plenty of flesh on my bones. However,
I am staying down here with some friends at present. You
know, I suppose, who I married?’
‘No.’
‘Jude Fawley—also a scholar of yours—at least a night
scholar—for some little time I think? And known to you
afterwards, if I am not mistaken.’
‘Dear me, dear me,’ said Phillotson, starting out of his
stiffness. ‘You Fawley’s wife? To be sure—he had a wife! And
he—I understood—’
‘Divorced her—as you did yours—perhaps for better
reasons.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Well—he med have been right in doing it—right for both;
for I soon married again, and all went pretty straight till my
husband died lately. But you—you were decidedly wrong!’
‘No,’ said Phillotson, with sudden testiness. ‘I would rather
not talk of this, but—I am convinced I did only what was
right, and just, and moral. I have suffered for my act and
opinions, but I hold to them; though her loss was a loss to
me in more ways than one!’
‘You lost your school and good income through her, did
you not?’
‘I don’t care to talk of it. I have recently come back here—
to Marygreen, I mean.’
‘You are keeping the school there again, just as formerly?’
 The pressure of a sadness that would out unsealed him. ‘I
am there,’ he replied. ‘Just as formerly, no. Merely on
sufferance. It was a last resource—a small thing to return to
after my move upwards, and my long indulged hopes—a
returning to zero, with all its humiliations. But it is a refuge. I
like the seclusion of the place, and the vicar having known
me before my so-called eccentric conduct towards my wife
had ruined my reputation as a schoolmaster, he accepted
my services when all other schools were closed against me.
However, although I take fifty pounds a year here after
taking above two hundred elsewhere, I prefer it to running
the risk of having my old domestic experiences raked up
against me, as I should do if I tried to make a move.’
‘Right you are. A contented mind is a continual feast. She
has done no better.’
‘She is not doing well, you mean?’
‘I met her by accident at Kennetbridge this very day, and
she is anything but thriving. Her husband is ill, and she
anxious. You made a fool of a mistake about her, I tell ’ee
again, and the harm you did yourself by dirting your own
nest serves you right, excusing the liberty.’
‘How?’
‘She was innocent.’
‘But nonsense! They did not even defend the case!’
‘That was because they didn’t care to. She was quite
innocent of what obtained you your freedom, at the time
you obtained it. I saw her just afterwards, and proved it to
myself completely by talking to her.’
Phillotson grasped the edge of the spring-cart, and
appeared to be much stressed and worried by the
information. ‘Still—she wanted to go,’ he said.
‘Yes. But you shouldn’t have let her. That’s the only way
with these fanciful women that chaw high50—innocent or
guilty. She’d have come round in time. We all do! Custom
does it! it’s all the same in the end! However, I think she’s
fond of her man still—whatever he med be of her. You were
too quick about her. I shouldn’t have let her go! I should
have kept her chained on—her spirit for kicking would have
been broke soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and
a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides,
you’ve got the laws on your side. Moses knew. Don’t you call
to mind what he says?’
‘Not for the moment, ma’am, I regret to say.’
‘Call yourself a schoolmaster! I used to think o’t when
they read it in church, and I was carrying on a bit. “Then
shall the man be guiltless; but the woman shall bear her
iniquity.”51 Damn rough on us women; but we must grin and
put up wi’ it!—Haw haw!—Well; she’s got her deserts now.’
‘Yes,’ said Phillotson, with biting sadness. ‘Cruelty is the
law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of
it if we would!’
‘Well—don’t you forget to try it next time, old man.’
‘I cannot answer you, madam. I have never known much
of womankind.’
They had now reached the low levels bordering
Alfredston, and passing through the outskirts approached a
mill, to which Phillotson said his errand led him; whereupon
they drew up, and he alighted, bidding them good-night in a
preoccupied mood.
In the meantime Sue, though remarkably successful in
her cakeselling experiment at Kennetbridge fair, had lost the
temporary brightness which had begun to sit upon her
sadness on account of that success. When all her
‘Christminster’ cakes had been disposed of she took upon
her arm the empty basket, and the cloth which had covered
the standing she had hired, and giving the other things to
the boy left the street with him. They followed a lane to a
distance of half a mile, till they met an old woman carrying a
child in short clothes, and leading a toddler in the other
hand.
Sue kissed the children, and said, ‘How is he now?’
 ‘Still better!’ returned Mrs. Edlin cheerfully. ‘Before you
are upstairs again your husband will be well enough—don’t
’ee trouble.’
They turned, and came to some old, dun-tiled52 cottages
with gardens and fruit-trees. Into one of these they entered
by lifting the latch without knocking, and were at once in the
general livingroom. Here they greeted Jude, who was sitting
in an arm-chair, the increased delicacy of his normally
delicate features, and the childishly expectant look in his
eyes, being alone sufficient to show that he had been
passing through a severe illness.
‘What—you have sold them all?’ he said, a gleam of
interest lighting up his face.
‘Yes. Arcades, gables, east windows and all.’ She told him
the pecuniary results, and then hesitated. At last, when they
were left alone, she informed him of the unexpected
meeting with Arabella, and the latter’s widowhood.
Jude was discomposed. ‘What—is she living here?’ he
said.
‘No; at Alfredston,’ said Sue.
Jude’s countenance remained clouded. ‘I thought I had
better tell you?’ she continued, kissing him anxiously.
‘Yes.… Dear me! Arabella not in the depths of London, but
down here! It is only a little over a dozen miles across the
country to Alfredston. What is she doing there?’
She told him all she knew. ‘She has taken to chapel-
going,’ Sue added; ‘and talks accordingly.’
‘Well,’ said Jude, ‘perhaps it is for the best that we have
almost decided to move on. I feel much better to-day, and
shall be well enough to leave in a week or two. Then Mrs.
Edlin can go home again—dear faithful old soul—the only
friend we have in the world!’
‘Where do you think to go to?’ Sue asked, a troublousness
in her tones.
Then Jude confessed what was in his mind. He said it
would surprise her, perhaps, after his having resolutely
avoided all the old places for so long. But one thing and
another had made him think a great deal of Christminster
lately, and, if she didn’t mind, he would like to go back
there. Why should they care if they were known? It was
oversensitive of them to mind so much. They could go on
selling cakes there, for that matter, if he couldn’t work. He
had no sense of shame at mere poverty; and perhaps he
would be as strong as ever soon, and able to set up stone-
cutting for himself there.
‘Why should you care so much for Christminster?’ she
said pensively. ‘Christminster cares nothing for you, poor
dear!’
‘Well, I do, I can’t help it. I love the place—although I
know how it hates all men like me—the so-called Self-
taught,—how it scorns our laboured acquisitions, when it
should be the first to respect them; how it sneers at our
false quantities53 and mispronunciations, when it should say,
I see you want help, my poor friend! … Nevertheless, it is
the centre of the universe to me, because of my early
dream: and nothing can alter it. Perhaps it will soon wake
up, and be generous. I pray so! … I should like to go back to
live there—perhaps to die there! In two or three weeks I
might, I think. It will then be June, and I should like to be
there by a particular day.’
His hope that he was recovering proved so far well
grounded that in three weeks they had arrived in the city of
many memories; were actually treading its pavements,
receiving the reflection of the sunshine from its wasting
walls.
 1. From Long’s translation (1862) of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus (121–180), Roman emperor and philosopher.
2. In English law, a court order for divorce is conditional for six months, after
which it is made absolute or final, unless cause to the contrary be shown.
3. Ancient Greek goddess of retributive justice and punishment.
4. Married (slang).
5. Head (slang).
6. Meaning obscure: perhaps “singleton,” or “loner.”
7. Soldier.
8. Model for the famous statue Aphrodite of Cnidus by the Greek sculptor
Praxiteles. “Via Sacra”: road in ancient Rome. Octavia was sister of the
emperor Augustus and wife of Mark Antony. Livia was wife of Augustus.
Aspasia was mistress of Pericles and celebrated as an intellectual.
9. From “Song” by Thomas Campbell (1777–1844).
10. Low-class public house.
11. Job 3.3.
12. Greek muse of tragedy.
13. Deuteronomy 20.7 (not quite accurately quoted).
14. Instruments for trimming the wick of, or extinguishing, candles.
15. Instructions for conducting church services in the Book of Common Prayer
used in the Church of England.
16. Fitting, proper (dialect).
17. Hanged on a gallows.
18. In Greek legend, the house of Atreus was under a curse and was visited by
many calamities. Its story forms the subject of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, the
Oresteia.
19. At an earlier time. For the quotation, cf. 1 Kings 14.10: God said, “I will bring
evil upon the house of Jeroboam.”
20. From John Milton’s poem “At a Vacation Exercise” (1628).
21. Doing the same as us.
22. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (1818).
23. Hardy may have been recalling John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “that
heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.”
24. It is not (dialect).
25. Children’s game played with pebbles or sheep’s bones.
26. Recalls a phrase in line 86 of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard (1751).
27. Property owner subject to local tax.
28. Psalms 90.9.
29. To a moderate degree (dialect).
30. Stock of drugs.
31. Inconclusive or puzzling reply.
32. Probably Matthew Arnold.
33. Used in the Communion service. “Tables of Jewish law”: the Ten
Commandments, which were often painted on boards fixed to the walls inside
the church.
34. The first division of the “Decalogue,” containing the first four
commandments (on duty to God); the remaining six commandments (on duty
to man) were written on the second table.
35. Glasses full to the brim. “Fuddled”: intoxicated.
36. Foot. The devil traditionally has a cloven foot.
37. The word was coined by T. H. Huxley about 1870.
38. Sir Christopher Wren (1631–1723) designed many churches and other
buildings in classical style. Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), architect and
propagandist of the Gothic Revival, which displaced Renaissance styles in
favor of imitation medievalism.
39. 2 Corinthians 7.2 (with slight omissions).
40. Judges 17.6 (“every man did that which was right in his own eyes”).
41. Covering or “cladding” a brick wall with thin slabs of stone.
42. Mourning dress.
43. Black silk used for mourning costume.
44. Temporary wooden fence surrounding a building under construction or repair.
45. Members of a congregation or denomination.
46. Stall.
47. Looking at, usually with an air of mockery.
48. Black cloth of good quality.
49. Nonconformist chapel.
50. The usual meaning of this dialect phrase is to be genteel, socially ambitious,
and contemptuous of one’s inferiors. Here it seems to imply in addition “get
out of hand, like to have one’s own way.”
51. Numbers 5.31 (slightly changed).
52. Roofed with dark tiles.
53. Confusion between long and short vowels or syllables in Latin or Greek
verse.

Part Sixth: At Christminster Again

‘… And she humbled her body greatly, and all the places of her joy
she filled with her torn hair.’
—Esther (Apoc.)1

‘There are two who decline, a woman and I,

And enjoy our death in the darkness here.’
—R. Browning2

VI–1
On their arrival the station was lively with straw-hatted
young men, welcoming young girls who bore a remarkable
family likeness to their welcomers, and who were dressed
up in the brightest and lightest of raiment.
‘The place seems gay,’ said Sue. ‘Why—it is
Remembrance Day!3—Jude—how sly of you—you came to-
day on purpose!’
‘Yes,’ said Jude quietly, as he took charge of the small
child, and told Arabella’s boy to keep close to them, Sue
attending to their own eldest. ‘I thought we might as well
come to-day as on any other.’
‘But I am afraid it will depress you!’ she said, looking
anxiously at him up and down.
‘O, I mustn’t let it interfere with our business; and we
have a good deal to do before we shall be settled here. The
first thing is lodgings.’
Having left their luggage and his tools at the station they
proceeded on foot up the familiar street, the holiday people
all drifting in the same direction. Reaching the Fourways
they were about to turn off to where accommodation was
likely to be found when, looking at the clock and the
hurrying crowd, Jude said: ‘Let us go and see the procession,
and never mind the lodgings just now? We can get them
afterwards.’
‘Oughtn’t we to get a house over our heads first?’ she
asked.
But his soul seemed full of the anniversary, and together
they went down Chief Street, their smallest child in Jude’s
arms, Sue leading her little girl, and Arabella’s boy walking
thoughtfully and silently beside them. Crowds of pretty
sisters in airy costumes, and meekly ignorant parents who
had known no College in their youth, were under convoy in
the same direction by brothers and sons bearing the opinion
written large on them, that no properly qualified human
beings had lived on earth till they came to grace it here and
now.
 ‘My failure is reflected on me by every one of those young
fellows,’ said Jude. ‘A lesson on presumption is awaiting me
to-day!—Humiliation Day for me! … If you, my dear darling,
hadn’t come to my rescue, I should have gone to the dogs
with despair!’
She saw from his face that he was getting into one of his
tempestuous, self-harrowing moods. ‘It would have been
better if we had gone at once about our own affairs, dear,’
she answered. ‘I am sure this sight will awaken old sorrows
in you, and do no good!’
‘Well—we are near; we will see it now,’ said he.
They turned in on the left by the church with Italian porch,
whose helical columns were heavily draped with creepers,
and pursued the lane till there arose on Jude’s sight the
circular theatre4 with that well-known lantern above it,
which stood in his mind as the sad symbol of his abandoned
hopes; for it was from that outlook that he had finally
surveyed the City of Colleges on the afternoon of his great
meditation, which convinced him at last of the futility of his
attempt to be a son of the University.
To-day, in the open space stretching between this building
and the nearest college, stood a crowd of expectant people.
A passage was kept clear through their midst by two
barriers of timber, extending from the door of the college to
the door of the large building between it and the theatre.
‘Here is the place—they are just going to pass!’ cried Jude
in sudden excitement. And pushing his way to the front he
took up a position close to the barrier, still hugging the
youngest child in his arms, while Sue and the others kept
immediately behind him. The crowd filled in at their back,
and fell to talking, joking, and laughing as carriage after
carriage drew up at the lower door of the college, and
solemn stately figures in blood-red robes5 began to alight.
The sky had grown overcast and livid, and thunder rumbled
now and then.
 Father Time shuddered. ‘It do seem like the Judgment
Day!’ he whispered.
‘They are only learned Doctors,’ said Sue.
While they waited big drops of rain fell on their heads and
shoulders, and the delay grew tedious. Sue again wished not
to stay.
‘They won’t be long now,’ said Jude, without turning his
head.
But the procession did not come forth, and somebody in
the crowd, to pass the time, looked at the façade of the
nearest college, and said he wondered what was meant by
the Latin inscription in its midst. Jude, who stood near the
inquirer, explained it, and finding that the people all round
him were listening with interest, went on to describe the
carving of the frieze (which he had studied years before),
and to criticize some details of masonry in other college
fronts about the city.
The idle crowd, including the two policemen at the doors,
stared like the Lycaonians at Paul,6 for Jude was apt to get
too enthusiastic over any subject in hand, and they seemed
to wonder how the stranger should know more about the
buildings of their town than they themselves did; till one of
them said: ‘Why I know that man; he used to work here
years ago—Jude Fawley, that’s his name! Don’t you mind he
used to be nicknamed Tutor of St. Slums, d’ye mind?—
because he aimed at that line o’ business? He’s married, I
suppose, then, and that’s his child he’s carrying. Taylor
would know him, as he knows everybody.’
The speaker was a man named Jack Stagg, with whom
Jude had formerly worked in repairing the college
masonries; Tinker Taylor was seen to be standing near.
Having his attention called the latter cried across the
barriers to Jude: ‘You’ve honoured us by coming back again,
my friend!’
Jude nodded.
 ‘An’ you don’t seem to have done any great things for
yourself by going away?’
‘Except found more mouths to fill!’ This came in a new
voice, and Jude recognized its owner to be Uncle Joe,
another mason whom he had known.
Jude replied good-humouredly that he could not dispute it;
and from remark to remark something like a general
conversation arose between him and the crowd of idlers,
during which Tinker Taylor asked Jude if he remembered the
Apostles’ Creed in Latin still, and the night of the challenge
in the public-house.
‘But Fortune didn’t lie that way?’ threw in Joe. ‘Yer powers
wasn’t enough to carry ’ee through?’
‘Don’t answer them any more!’ entreated Sue.
‘I don’t think I like Christminster!’ murmured little Time
mournfully, as he stood submerged and invisible in the
crowd.
But finding himself the centre of curiosity, quizzing, and
comment, Jude was not inclined to shrink from open
declarations of what he had no great reason to be ashamed
of; and in a little while was stimulated to say in a loud voice
to the listening throng generally:
‘It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man—
that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands
are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times
—whether to follow uncritically the track he find himself in,
without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what
his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course
accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don’t
admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or
that my success would have made it a right one; though
that’s how we appraise such attempts nowadays—I mean,
not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental
outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these
gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by
now, everybody would have said: “See how wise that young
man was, to follow the bent of his nature!” But having
ended no better than I began they say: “See what a fool that
fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!”
‘However it was my poverty and not my will that
consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to
do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses—affections—
vices perhaps they should be called—were too strong not to
hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-
blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really
good chance of being one of his country’s worthies. You may
ridicule me—I am quite willing that you should—I am a fit
subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone
through these last few years you would rather pity me. And
if they knew’—he nodded towards the college at which the
Dons were severally arriving—‘it is just possible they would
do the same.’
‘He do look ill and worn-out, it is true!’ said a woman.
Sue’s face grew more emotional; but though she stood
close to Jude she was screened.
‘I may do some good before I am dead—be a sort of
success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so
illustrate a moral story,’ continued Jude, beginning to grow
bitter, though he had opened serenely enough. ‘I was,
perhaps, after all, a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and
social restlessness, that makes so many unhappy in these
days!’
‘Don’t tell them that!’ whispered Sue with tears, at
perceiving Jude’s state of mind. ‘You weren’t that. You
struggled nobly to acquire knowledge, and only the meanest
souls in the world would blame you!’
Jude shifted the child into a more easy position on his
arm, and concluded: ‘And what I appear, a sick and poor
man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles—
groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after
example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I
had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away
one by one and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if
I have anything more for my present rule of life than
following inclinations which do me and nobody else any
harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There,
gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on,
I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain
further here. I perceive there is something wrong
somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be
discovered by men or women with greater insight than
mine,—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least in our time.
“For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?—and
who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?”7
‘Hear, hear,’ said the populace.
‘Well preached!’ said Tinker Taylor. And privately to his
neighbours: ‘Why, one of them jobbing pa’sons swarming
about here, that takes the services when our head
Reverends want a holiday, wouldn’t ha’ discoursed such
doctrine for less than a guinea down? Hey? I’ll take my oath
not one o’ ’em would! And then he must have had it wrote
down for ’n. And this only a working man!’
As a sort of objective commentary on Jude’s remarks
there drove up at this moment with a belated Doctor, robed
and panting, a cab whose horse failed to stop at the exact
point required for setting down the hirer, who jumped out
and entered the door. The driver, alighting, began to kick
the animal in the belly.
‘If that can be done,’ said Jude, ‘at college gates in the
most religious and educational city in the world, what shall
we say as to how far we’ve got?’
‘Order!’ said one of the policemen, who had been
engaged with a comrade in opening the large doors
opposite the college. ‘Keep yer tongue quiet, my man, while
the procession passes.’ The rain came on more heavily, and
all who had umbrellas opened them. Jude was not one of
these, and Sue only possessed a small one, half sunshade.
She had grown pale, though Jude did not notice it then.
 ‘Let us go on, dear,’ she whispered, endeavouring to
shelter him. ‘We haven’t any lodgings yet, remember, and
all our things are at the station; and you are by no means
well yet. I am afraid this wet will hurt you!’
‘They are coming now. Just a moment, and I’ll go!’ said
he.
A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd
the windows around, and the procession of Heads of Houses
and new Doctors emerged, their red and black gowned
forms passing across the field of Jude’s vision like
inaccessible planets across an object glass.8
As they went their names were called by knowing
informants; and when they reached the old round theatre of
Wren a cheer rose high.
‘Let’s go that way!’ cried Jude, and though it now rained
steadily he seemed not to know it, and took them round to
the Theatre. Here they stood upon the straw that was laid to
drown the discordant noise of wheels, where the quaint and
frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with
pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the
bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous
persons who had no business there.
‘I wish I could get in!’ he said to her fervidly. ‘Listen—I
may catch a few words of the Latin speech by staying here;
the windows are open.’
However, beyond the peals of the organ, and the shouts
and hurrahs between each piece of oratory, Jude’s standing
in the wet did not bring much Latin to his intelligence more
than, now and then, a sonorous word in um or ibus.
‘Well—I’m an outsider to the end of my days!’ he sighed
after a while. ‘Now I’ll go, my patient Sue. How good of you
to wait in the rain all this time—to gratify my infatuation! I’ll
never care any more about the infernal cursed place, upon
my soul I won’t! But what made you tremble so when we
were at the barrier? And how pale you are, Sue!’
‘I saw Richard amongst the people on the other side.’
 ‘Ah—did you!’
‘He is evidently come up to Jerusalem to see the festival9
like the rest of us: and on that account is probably living not
so very far away. He had the same hankering for the
University that you had, in a milder form. I don’t think he
saw me, though he must have heard you speaking to the
crowd. But he seemed not to notice.’
‘Well—suppose he did. Your mind is free from worries
about him now, my Sue?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. But I am weak. Although I know it is all
right withour plans, I felt a curious dread of him; an awe, or
terror, of conventions I don’t believe in. It comes over me at
times like a sort of creeping paralysis, and makes me so
sad!’
‘You are getting tired, Sue. O—I forgot, darling! Yes, we’ll
go on at once.’
They started in quest of the lodging, and at last found
something that seemed to promise well, in Mildew Lane—a
spot which to Jude was irresistible—though to Sue it was not
so fascinating—a narrow lane close to the back of a college,
but having no communication with it. The little houses were
darkened to gloom by the high collegiate buildings, within
which life was so far removed from that of the people in the
lane as if it had been on opposite sides of the globe; yet
only a thickness of wall divided them. Two or three of the
houses had notices of rooms to let, and the newcomers
knocked at the door of one, which a woman opened.
‘Ah—listen!’ said Jude suddenly, instead of addressing
her.
‘What?’
‘Why the bells—what church can that be? The tones are
familiar.’
Another peal of bells had begun to sound out at some
distance off.
‘I don’t know!’ said the landlady tartly. ‘Did you knock to
ask that?’
 ‘No; for lodgings,’ said Jude, coming to himself.
The householder scrutinized Sue’s figure a moment. ‘We
haven’t any to let,’ said she, shutting the door.
Jude looked discomfited, and the boy distressed. ‘Now,
Jude,’ said Sue, ‘let me try. You don’t know the way.’
They found a second place hard by; but here the
occupier, observing not only Sue, but the boy and the small
children, said civilly, ‘I am sorry to say we don’t let where
there are children;’ and also closed the door.
The small child squared its mouth and cried silently, with
an instinct that trouble loomed. The boy sighed. ‘I don’t like
Christminster!’ he said. ‘Are the great old houses gaols?’
‘No; colleges,’ said Jude; ‘which perhaps you’ll study in
some day.’
‘I’d rather not!’ the boy rejoined.
‘Now we’ll try again,’ said Sue. ‘I’ll pull my cloak more
round me.… Leaving Kennetbridge for this place is like
coming from Caiaphas to Pilate!10 … How do I look now,
dear?’
‘Nobody would notice it now,’ said Jude.
There was one other house, and they tried a third time.
The woman here was more amiable; but she had little room
to spare, and could only agree to take in Sue and the
children if her husband could go elsewhere. This
arrangement they perforce adopted, in the stress from
delaying their search till so late. They came to terms with
her, though her price was rather high for their pockets. But
they could not afford to be critical till Jude had time to get a
more permanent abode; and in this house Sue took
possession of a back room on the second floor with an inner
closet-room for the children. Jude stayed and had a cup of
tea; and was pleased to find that the window commanded
the back of another of the colleges. Kissing all four he went
to get a few necessaries and look for lodgings for himself.
When he was gone the landlady came up to talk a little
with Sue, and gather something of the circumstances of the
family she had taken in. Sue had not the art of
prevarication, and, after admitting several facts as to their
late difficulties and wanderings, she was startled by the
landlady saying suddenly:
“Are you really a married woman?’
She hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that
her husband and herself had each been unhappy in their
first marriages, after which, terrified at the thought of a
second irrevocable union, and lest the conditions of the
contract should kill their love, yet wishing to be together,
they had literally not found the courage to repeat it, though
they had attempted it two or three times. Therefore, though
in her own sense of the words she was a married woman, in
the landlady’s sense she was not.
The housewife looked embarrassed, and went downstairs.
Sue sat by the window in a reverie, watching the rain. Her
quiet was broken by the noise of some one entering the
house, and then the voices of a man and woman in
conversation in the passage below. The landlady’s husband
had arrived, and she was explaining to him the incoming of
the lodgers during his absence.
His voice rose in sudden anger. ‘Now who wants such a
woman here? and perhaps a confinement! … Besides, didn’t
I say I wouldn’t have children? The hall and stairs fresh
painted, to be kicked about by them! You must have known
all was not straight with ’em—coming like that. Taking in a
family when I said a single man.’
The wife expostulated, but, as it seemed, the husband
insisted on his point; for presently a tap came to Sue’s door,
and the woman appeared.
‘I am sorry to tell you, ma’am, she said, ‘that I can’t let
you have the room for the week after all. My husband
objects and therefore I must ask you to go. I don’t mind your
staying over to-night, as it is getting late in the afternoon;
but I shall be glad if you can leave early in the morning.’
 Though she knew that she was entitled to the lodging for
a week, Sue did not wish to create a disturbance between
the wife and husband, and she said she would leave as
requested. When the landlady had gone Sue looked out of
the window again. Finding that the rain had ceased she
proposed to the boy that, after putting the little ones to bed,
they should go out and search about for another place, and
bespeak it for the morrow, so as not to be so hard driven
then as they had been that day.
Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just
been sent on from the station by Jude, they sallied out into
the damp though not unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not
to disturb her husband with the news of her notice to quit
while he was perhaps worried in obtaining a lodging for
himself. In the company of the boy she wandered into this
street and into that; but though she tried a dozen different
houses she fared far worse alone than she had fared in
Jude’s company, and could get nobody to promise her a
room for the following day. Every house-holder looked
askance at such a woman and child inquiring for
accommodation in the gloom.
‘I ought not to be born, ought I?’ said the boy with
misgiving.
Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where
she was not welcome, but where at least she had temporary
shelter. In her absence Jude had left his address; but
knowing how weak he still was she adhered to her
determination not to disturb him till the next day.

VI–2
Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house
being little more than an old intramural11 cottage, and then
she regarded the scene outside the uncurtained window. At
some distance opposite, the outer walls of Sarcophagus
College—silent, black and windowless—threw their four
centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room
she occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the
sun by day. The outlines of Rubric College12 also were
discernible beyond the other, and the tower of a third
further off still. She thought of the strange operation of a
simple-minded man’s ruling passion, that it should have led
Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place
them here in this depressing purlieu,13 because he was still
haunted by his dream. Even now he did not distinctly hear
the freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed
to his desire.
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in
this house for his father, had made a deep impression on
the boy;—a brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to
have seized him. The silence was broken by his saying:
‘Mother, what shall we do tomorrow!’
‘I don’t know!’ said Sue despondently. ‘I am afraid this will
trouble your father.’
‘I wish father was quite well, and there had been room for
him! Then it wouldn’t matter so much! Poor father!’
‘It wouldn’t!’
‘Can I do anything?’
‘No! All is trouble, adversity and suffering!’
‘Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?’
‘Partly.’
‘It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it,
wouldn’t it?’
‘It would almost, dear.’
‘ ’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t
get a good lodging?’
‘Well—people do object to children sometimes.’
‘Then if children make so much trouble, why do people
have ’em?’
‘O—because it is a law of nature.’
‘But we don’t ask to be born?’
‘No indeed.’
 ‘And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my
real mother, and you needn’t have had me unless you liked.
I oughtn’t to have come to ’ee—that’s the real truth! I
troubled ’em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I
hadn’t been born!’
‘You couldn’t help it, my dear.’
‘I think that whenever children be born that are not
wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls
come to ’em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!’
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to
treat this too reflective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances
permitted, she would be honest and candid with one who
entered into her difficulties liked an aged friend.
‘There is going to be another in our family soon,’ she
hesitatingly remarked.
‘How?’
‘There is going to be another baby.’
‘What!’ The boy jumped up wildly. ‘O God, mother, you’ve
never a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you’ve
got!’
‘Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!’ murmured Sue, her eyes
glistening with suspended tears.
The boy burst out weeping. ‘O you don’t care, you don’t
care!’ he cried in bitter reproach. ‘How ever could you,
mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when you needn’t
have done it till we was better off, and father well!—To bring
us all into more trouble! No room for us, and father a-forced
to go away, and we turned out tomorrow; and yet you be
going to have another of us soon! …’Tis done o’ purpose!
—’tis—’tis!’ He walked up and down sobbing.
‘Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!’ she pleaded, her
bosom heaving now as much as the boy’s. ‘I can’t explain—I
will when you are older. It does seem—as if I had done it on
purpose, now we are in these difficulties! I can’t explain,
dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I can’t help it!’
 ‘Yes it is—it must be! For nobody would interfere with us,
like that, unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever, ever!
I’ll never believe you care for me, or father, or any of us any
more!’
He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her
room, in which a bed had been spread on the floor. There
she heard him say: ‘If we children was gone there’d be no
trouble at all!’
‘Don’t think that, dear,’ she cried, rather peremptorily.
‘But go to sleep!’
The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and
decided to get up and run across before breakfast to the inn
which Jude had informed her to be his quarters, to tell him
what had happened before he went out. She arose softly, to
avoid disturbing the children, who, as she knew, must be
fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.
She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had
chosen as a counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and
she explained to him her homelessness. He had been so
anxious about her all night, he said. Somehow, now it was
morning, the request to leave the lodgings did not seem
such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night
before, nor did even her failure to find another place affect
her so deeply as at first. Jude agreed with her that it would
not be worth while to insist upon her right to stay a week,
but to take immediate steps for removal.
‘You must all come to this inn for a day or two,’ he said. ‘It
is a rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children,
but we shall have more time to look round. There are plenty
of lodgings in the suburbs—in my old quarter of Beersheba.
Have breakfast with me now you are here, my bird. You are
sure you are well? There will be plenty of time to get back
and prepare the children’s meal before they wake. In fact,
I’ll go with you.’
She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an
hour they started together, resolving to clear out from Sue’s
too respectable lodging immediately. On reaching the place
and going upstairs she found that all was quiet in the
children’s room, and called to the landlady in timorous tones
to please bring up the tea-kettle and something for their
breakfast. This was perfunctorily done, and producing a
couple of eggs which she had brought with her she put them
into the boiling kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them
for the youngsters, while she went to call them, it being now
about half-past eight o’clock.
Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his
hand, timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the
little inner chamber where the children lay. A shriek from
Sue suddenly caused him to start round. He saw that the
door of the room, or rather closet—which had seemed to go
heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back—was open,
and that Sue had sunk to the floor just within it. Hastening
forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the little bed
spread on the boards; no children were there. He looked in
bewilderment round the room. At the back of the door were
fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the
forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a
piece of box-cord round each of their necks, while from a
nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a
similar manner. An overturned chair was near the elder boy,
and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but those of
the girl and the baby boy were closed.
Half paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of
the scene he let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife
and threw the three children on the bed; but the feel of their
bodies in the momentary handling seemed to say that they
were dead. He caught up Sue, who was in fainting fits, and
put her on the bed in the other room, after which he
breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a
doctor.
When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two
helpless women, bending over the children in wild efforts to
restore them, and the triplet of little corpses, formed a sight
which overthrew his self-command. The nearest surgeon
came in, but, as Jude had inferred, his presence was
superfluous. The children were past saving, for though their
bodies were still barely cold it was conjectured that they had
been hanging more than an hour. The probability held by
the parents later on, when they were able to reason on the
case, was that the elder boy, on waking, looked into the
outer room for Sue, and, finding her absent, was thrown into
a fit of aggravated despondency that the events and
information of the evening before had induced in his morbid
temperament. Moreover a piece of paper was found upon
the floor, on which was written, in the boy’s hand, with the
bit of lead pencil that he carried:
‘Done because we are too menny.’
At sight of this Sue’s nerves utterly gave way, an awful
conviction that her discourse with the boy had been the
main cause of the tragedy, throwing her into a convulsive
agony which knew no abatement. They carried her away
against her wish to a room on the lower floor; and there she
lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her eyes
staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying
to soothe her.
They could hear from this chamber the people moving
about above, and she implored to be allowed to go back,
and was only kept from doing so by the assurance that, if
there were any hope, her presence might do harm, and the
reminder that it was necessary to take care of herself lest
she should endanger a coming life. Her inquiries were
incessant, and at last Jude came down and told her there
was no hope. As soon as she could speak she informed him
what she had said to the boy, and how she thought herself
the cause of this.
‘No,’ said Jude. ‘It was in his nature to do it. The doctor
says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of
a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new
views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are
old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it
is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.
He’s an advanced man, the doctor: but he can give no
consolation to—’
Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he
now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of
sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her
poignant self-reproach. When everybody was gone, she was
allowed to see the children.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation.
On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness
and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and
all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was
their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single
term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for
their ill-assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes
of these he had died.
When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but
await the coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice
spread into the air of the room from behind the heavy walls
at the back.
‘What is it?’ said Sue, her spasmodic breathing
suspended.
‘The organ of the College chapel. The organist practising I
suppose. It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm;
“Truly God is loving unto Israel.” ’
She sobbed again. ‘O, O my babies! They had done no
harm! Why should they have been taken away, and not I!’
There was another stillness—broken at last by two
persons in conversation somewhere without.
‘They are talking about us, no doubt!’ moaned Sue. ‘ “We
are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to
men!” ’14
 Jude listened—‘No—they are not talking of us,’ he said.
‘They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about
the eastward position.15 Good God—the eastward position,
and all creation groaning!16
Then another silence, till she was seized with another
uncontrollable fit of grief. ‘There is something external to us
which says. “You shan’t!” First it said, “You shan’t learn!”
Then it said, “You shan’t labour!” Now it says, “You shan’t
love!” ’
He tried to soothe her by saying, ‘That’s bitter of you,
darling.’
‘But it’s true!’
Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room.
The baby’s frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on
a chair at the time of his death, she would not now have
removed, though Jude would fain have got them out of her
sight. But whenever he touched them she implored him to
let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of
the house when she also attempted to put them away.
Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than
her paroxysms. ‘Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?’ she
cried out, after one of these. ‘Don’t turn away from me! I
can’t bear the loneliness of being out of your looks!’
‘There, dear; here I am,’ he said, putting his face close to
hers.
‘Yes.… O my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-
oneness—is now stained with blood!’
‘Shadowed by death—that’s all.’
‘Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t
know I was doing it! I talked to the child as one should only
talk to people of mature age. I said the world was against
us, that it was better to be out of life than in it at this price;
and he took it literally. And I told him I was going to have
another child. It upset him. O how bitterly he upbraided
me!’
‘Why did you do it, Sue?’
 ‘I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t
bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t
truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—
Why was I half wiser than my fellow-women? and not
entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him pleasant untruths,
instead of half realities? It was my want of self-control, so
that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!’
‘Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of
cases; only in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly
perhaps. He must have known sooner or later.’
‘And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and
now I shall never see him in it, and never talk to him any
more! … My eyes are so swollen that I can scarcely see; and
yet little more than a year ago I called myself happy! We
went about loving each other too much—indulging ourselves
to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you
remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it
was Nature’s intention, Nature’s law and raison d’être17 that
we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us—
instincts which civilization had taken upon itself to thwart.
What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has given us this
stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature at her
word!’
She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, ‘It is
best, perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is!
Better that they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither
away miserably!’
‘Yes,’ replied Jude. ‘Some say that the elders should
rejoice when their children die in infancy.’
‘But they don’t know! … O my babies, my babies, could
you be alive now! You may say the boy wished to be out of
life, or he wouldn’t have done it. It was not unreasonable for
him to die: it was part of his incurably sad nature, poor little
fellow! But then the others—my own children and yours!’
Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the
socks and shoes; and her figure quivered like a string. ‘I am
a pitiable creature,’ she said, ‘good neither for earth nor
heaven any more! I am driven out of my mind by things!
What ought to be done?’ She stared at Jude, and tightly held
his hand.
‘Nothing can be done,’ he replied. ‘Things are as they are,
and will be brought to their destined issue.’
She paused. ‘Yes! Who said that?’ she asked heavily.
‘It comes in the chorus of the Agamemnon.18 It has been
in my mind continually since this happened.’
‘My poor Jude—how you’ve missed everything!—you more
than I, for I did get you! To think you should know that by
your unassisted reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!’
After such momentary diversions her grief would return in
a wave.
The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest
was held; and next arrived the melancholy morning of the
funeral. Accounts in the newspapers had brought to the spot
curious idlers, who stood apparently counting the window-
panes and the stones of the walls. Doubt of the real
relations of the couple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had
declared that she would follow the two little ones to the
grave, but at the last moment she gave way, and the coffins
were quietly carried out of the house while she was lying
down. Jude got into the vehicle, and it drove away, much to
the relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue and her
luggage remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also
clear of later on in the day, and so to have freed his house
from the exasperating notoriety it had acquired during the
week through his wife’s unlucky admission of these
strangers. In the afternoon he privately consulted with the
owner of the house, and they agreed that if any objection to
it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there they
would try to get its number changed.
When Jude had seen the two little boxes—one containing
little Jude, and the other the two smallest—deposited in the
earth he hastened back to Sue, who was still in her room,
and he therefore did not disturb her just then. Feeling
anxious, however, he went again about four o’clock. The
woman thought she was still lying down, but returned to him
to say that she was not in her bedroom after all. Her hat and
jacket, too, were missing: she had gone out. Jude hurried off
to the public-house where he was sleeping. She had not
been there. Then bethinking himself of possibilities he went
along the road to the cemetery, which he entered, and
crossed to where the interments had recently taken place.
The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the
tragedy were all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands
was attempting to earth in the common grave of the three
children, but his arm was held back by an expostulating
woman who stood in the half-filled hole. It was Sue, whose
coloured clothing, which she had never thought of changing
for the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye a
deeper grief than the conventional garb of bereavement
could express.
‘He’s filling them in, and he shan’t till I’ve seen my little
ones again!’ she cried wildly when she saw Jude. ‘I want to
see them once more. O Jude—please Jude—I want to see
them! I didn’t know you would let them be taken away while
I was asleep! You said perhaps I should see them once more
before they were screwed down; and then you didn’t, but
took them away! O Jude, you are cruel to me too!’
‘She’s been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and
let her get to the coffins,’ said the man with the spade. ‘She
ought to be took home, by the look o’ her. She is hardly
responsible, poor thing, seemingly. Can’t dig ’em up again
now, ma’am. Do ye go home with your husband, and take it
quiet, and thank God that there’ll be another soon to
swage19 yer grief.’
But Sue kept asking piteously: ‘Can’t I see them once
more—just once! Can’t I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It
would not take long! And I should be so glad, Jude! I will be
so good, and not disobey you ever any more, Jude, if you
will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards, and not
want to see them any more! Can’t I? Why can’t I?’
Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute
sorrow that he almost felt he would try to get the man to
accede. But it could do no good, and might make her still
worse; and he saw that it was imperative to get her home at
once. So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put his
arm round her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and
was induced to leave the cemetery.
He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but
economy being so imperative she deprecated his doing so,
and they walked along slowly, Jude in black crape, she in
brown and red clothing. They were to have gone to a new
lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was not
practicable, and in course of time they entered the now
hated house. Sue was at once got to bed, and the doctor
sent for.
Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour
the intelligence was brought to him that a child had been
prematurely born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.

VI–3
Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and
Jude had again obtained work at his old trade. They were in
other lodgings now, in the direction of Beersheba, and not
far from the Church of Ceremonies—Saint Silas.
They would sit silent, more bodeful20 of the direct
antagonism of things than of their insensate and stolid
obstructiveness. Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted
Sue in the days when her intellect scintillated like a star,
that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a
dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused
intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that
the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist,
and not reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the
terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been
contemplated such a development of emotional
perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those
conditions as that reached by thinking and educated
humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces loom
anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged
for a sense of Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.
‘We must conform!’ she said mournfully. “All the ancient
wrath of the Power above us has been vented upon us, His
poor creatures, and we must submit. There is no choice. We
must. It is no use fighting against God!’
‘It is only against man and senseless circumstance,’ said
Jude.
‘True!’ she murmured. ‘What have I been thinking of! I am
getting as superstitious as a savage! … But whoever or
whatever our foe may be, I am cowed into submission. I
have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprise. I
am beaten, beaten! … “We are made a spectacle unto the
world, and to angels, and to men!” I am always saying that
now.’
‘I feel the same!’
‘What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it
may only be because our history and relations are not
absolutely known.… Possibly, if they knew our marriage had
not been formalized they would turn you out of your job as
they did at Aldbrickham!’
‘I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that.
However, I think that we ought to make it legal now—as
soon as you are able to go out.’
‘You think we ought?’
‘Certainly.’
And Jude fell into thought. ‘I have seemed to myself
lately,’ he said, ‘to belong to that vast band of men shunned
by the virtuous—the men called seducers. It amazes me
when I think of it! I have not been conscious of it, or of any
wrong-doing towards you, whom I love more than myself.
Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them are
the same purblind, simple creatures as I? … Yes, Sue—that’s
what I am. I seduced you.… You were a distinct type—a
refined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact. But I
couldn’t leave you alone!’
‘No, no, Jude!’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t reproach yourself
with being what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I.’
‘I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and
without me perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you
go.’
‘I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of
our not having entered into a legal contract is the saving
feature in our union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as
it were, the solemnity of our first marriages.’
‘Solemnity?’ Jude looked at her with some surprise, and
grew conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier
time.
‘Yes,’ she said, with a little quiver in her words, ‘I have
had dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of
action. I have thought—that I am still his wife!’
‘Whose?’
‘Richard’s.’
‘Good God, dearest!—why?’
‘O I can’t explain! Only the thought comes to me.’
‘It is your weakness—a sick fancy,21 without reason or
meaning! Don’t let it trouble you.’
Sue sighed uneasily.
As a set-off against such discussions as these there had
come an improvement in their pecuniary position, which
earlier in their experience would have made them cheerful.
Jude had quite unexpectedly found good employment at his
old trade almost directly he arrived, the summer weather
suiting his fragile constitution; and outwardly his days went
on with that monotonous uniformity which is in itself so
grateful after vicissitude. People seemed to have forgotten
that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies: and he
daily mounted to the parapets and copings22 of colleges he
could never enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of
mullioned windows he would never look from, as if he had
known no wish to do otherwise.
There was this change in him; that he did not often go to
any service at the churches now. One thing troubled him
more than any other; that Sue and himself had mentally
travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events
which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and
dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue’s.
She was no longer the same as in the independent days,
when her intellect played like lambent lightning over
conventions and formalities which he at that time respected,
though he did not now.
On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late.
She was not at home, but she soon returned, when he found
her silent and meditative.
‘What are you thinking of, little woman?’ he asked
curiously.
‘O I can’t tell clearly! I have thought that we have been
selfish, careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I.
Our life has been a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-
abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh—
the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!’
‘Sue!’ he murmured. ‘What has come over you?’
‘We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the
altar of duty! But I have always striven to do what has
pleased me. I well deserved the scourging I have got! I wish
something would take the evil right out of me, and all my
monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!’
‘Sue—my own too suffering dear!—there’s no evil woman
in you. Your natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite
so impassioned, perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and
dear, and pure. And as I have often said, you are absolutely
the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist
without inhuman sexlessness. Why do you talk in such a
changed way? We have not been selfish, except when no
one could profit by our being otherwise. You used to say that
human nature was noble and long-suffering, not vile and
corrupt, and at last I thought you spoke truly. And now you
seem to take such a much lower view!’
‘I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have
never had them yet!’
‘You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler,
and you deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too
full of narrow dogmas at that time to see it.’
‘Don’t say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and
thought could be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation
—that’s everything! I cannot humilitate myself too much. I
should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out
the badness that’s in me!’
‘Hush!’ he said, pressing her little face against his breast
as if she were an infant. ‘It is bereavement that has brought
you to this! Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive
plant,23 but for the wicked ones of the earth—who never feel
it!’
‘I ought not to stay like this,’ she murmured, when she
had remained in the position a long while.
‘Why not?’
‘It is indulgence.’
‘Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on
earth than that we should love one another?’
‘Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours—ours—is
the wrong.’
‘I won’t have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our
marriage to be signed in a vestry?’
She paused, and looked up uneasily. ‘Never,’ she
whispered.
Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the
objection serenely, and said nothing. Several minutes
elapsed, and he thought she had fallen asleep; but he spoke
softly, and found that she was wide awake all the time. She
sat upright and sighed.
‘There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere
about you to-night, Sue,’ he said. ‘I mean not only mentally,
but about your clothes, also. A sort of vegetable scent,
which I seem to know, yet cannot remember.’
‘It is incense.’
‘Incense?’
‘I have been to the service at St. Silas’, and I was in the
fumes of it.’
‘Oh—St. Silas’.’
‘Yes. I go there sometimes.’
‘Indeed. You go there!’
‘You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the week-day mornings,
when you are at work, and I think and think of—of my—’ She
stopped till she could control the lumpiness of her throat.
‘And I have taken to go in there, as it is so near.’
‘O well—of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd,
for you. They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!’24
‘What do you mean, Jude?’
‘Well—a sceptic, to be plain.’
‘How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I
know you didn’t mean it. But you ought not to say that.’
‘I won’t. But I am much surprised!’
‘Well—I want to tell you something else, Jude. You won’t
be angry, will you? I have thought of it a good deal since my
babies died. I don’t think I ought to be your wife—or as your
wife—any longer.’
‘What? … But you are!’
‘From your point of view; but—’
‘Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good
many others would have been in our places, with such
strong reasons for fears. But experience has proved how we
misjudged ourselves, and overrated our infirmities; and if
you are beginning to respect rites and ceremonies, as you
seem to be, I wonder you don’t say it shall be carried out
instantly? You certainly are my wife, Sue, in all but law. What
do you mean by what you said?’
‘I don’t think I am!’
‘Not? But suppose we had gone through the ceremony?
Would you feel that you were then?’
‘No. I should not feel even then that I was. I should feel
worse than I do now.’
‘Why so—in the name of all that’s perverse, my dear?’
‘Because I am Richard’s.’
‘Ah—you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!’
‘It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and
more convinced as time goes on that—I belong to him, or to
nobody.’
‘My good heavens—how we are changing places!’
‘Yes. Perhaps so.’
Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening,
they were sitting in the same small room downstairs, when
a knock came to the front door of the carpenter’s house
where they were lodging, and in a few moments there was a
tap at the door of their room. Before they could open it the
comer did so, and a woman’s form appeared.
‘Is Mr. Fawley here?’
Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the
affirmative, for the voice was Arabella’s.
He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down
in the window bench, where they could distinctly see her
outline against the light; but no characteristic that enabled
them to estimate her general aspect and air. Yet something
seemed to denote that she was not quite so comfortably
circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she had been
during Cartlett’s lifetime.
The three attempted an awkward conversation about the
tragedy, of which Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her
immediately, though she had never replied to his letter.
‘I have just come from the cemetery,’ she said. ‘I inquired
and found the child’s grave. I couldn’t come to the funeral—
thank you for inviting me all the same. I read all about it in
the papers, and I felt I wasn’t wanted.… No—I couldn’t come
to the funeral,’ repeated Arabella, who, seeming utterly
unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic manner, fumbled
with iterations. ‘But I am glad I found the grave. As ’tis your
trade, Jude, you’ll be able to put up a handsome stone to
’em.’
‘I shall put up a headstone,’ said Jude drearily.
‘He was my child, and naturally I feel for him.’
‘I hope so. We all did.’
‘The others that weren’t mine I didn’t feel so much for, as
was natural.’
‘Of course.’
A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.
‘I had often wished I had mine with me,’ continued Mrs.
Cartlett. ‘Perhaps ’twouldn’t have happened then! But of
course I didn’t wish to take him away from your wife.’
‘I am not his wife,’ came from Sue.
The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.
‘O I beg your pardon, I’m sure,’ said Arabella. ‘I thought
you were!’
Jude had known from the quality of Sue’s tone that her
new and transcendental views lurked in her words; but all
except their obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by
Arabella. The latter, after evincing that she was struck by
Sue’s avowal, recovered herself, and went on to talk with
placid bluntness about ‘her’ boy, for whom, though in his
lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a
ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to
the conscience. She alluded to the past, and in making
some remark appealed again to Sue. There was no answer:
Sue had invisibly left the room.
‘She said she was not your wife?’ resumed Arabella in
another voice. ‘Why should she do that?’
‘I cannot inform you,’ said Jude shortly.
‘She is, isn’t she? She once told me so.’
 ‘I don’t criticize what she says.’
‘Ah—I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night
and thought I could do no less than call, after our mutual
affliction. I am sleeping at the place where I used to be
barmaid, and to-morrow I go back to Alfredston. Father is
come home again, and I am living with him.’
‘He has returned from Australia?’ said Jude with languid
curiosity.
‘Yes. Couldn’t get on there. Had a rough time of it. Mother
died of dys—what do you call it—in the hot weather, and
father and two of the young ones have just got back. He has
got a cottage near the old place, and for the present I am
keeping house for him.’
Jude’s former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner
of strict good breeding even now that Sue was gone, and
limited her stay to a number of minutes that should accord
with the highest respectability. When she had departed Jude,
much relieved, went to the stairs and called Sue—feeling
anxious as to what had become of her.
There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the
lodgings said she had not come in. Jude was puzzled, and
became quite alarmed at her absence, for the hour was
growing late. The carpenter called his wife, who conjectured
that Sue might have gone to St. Silas’ church, as she often
went there.
‘Surely not at this time o’ night?’ said Jude. ‘It is shut.’
‘She knows somebody who keeps the key, and she has it
whenever she wants it.’
‘How long has she been going on with this?’
‘Oh, some few weeks, I think.’
Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he
had never once approached since he lived out that way
years before when his young opinions were more mystical
than they were now. The spot was deserted, but the door
was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch without noise,
and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely still
inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint
sound, explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came
from the other end of the building. The floor-cloth deadened
his footsteps as he moved in that direction through the
obscurity, which was broken only by the faintest reflected
night-light from without.
High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could
discern a huge, solidly constructed Latin cross—as large,
probably, as the original it was designed to commemorate.
It seemed to be suspended in the air by invisible wires; it
was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered in some
weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed to and
fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath,
upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black
clothes, and from this was repeated the sobbing that he had
heard before. It was his Sue’s form, prostrate on the paving.
‘Sue!’ he whispered.
Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her
face.
‘What—do you want with me here, Jude?’ she said almost
sharply. ‘You shouldn’t come! I wanted to be alone! Why did
you intrude here?’
‘How can you ask!’ he retorted in quick reproach, for his
full heart was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers
towards him. ‘Why do I come? Who has a right to come, I
should like to know, if I have not! I, who love you better than
my own self—better—O far better—than you have loved me!
What made you leave me to come here alone?’
‘Don’t criticize me, Jude—I can’t bear it!—I have often told
you so. You must take me as I am. I am a wretch—broken by
my distractions! I couldn’t bear it when Arabella came—I felt
so utterly miserable I had to come away. She seems to be
your wife still, and Richard to be my husband!’
‘But they are nothing to us!’
‘Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage differently now.
My babies have been taken from me to show me this!
Arabella’s child killing mine was a judgment—the right
slaying the wrong. What, what shall I do! I am such a vile
creature—too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!’
‘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,25 or whatever 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
herself 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
ratified eternally in the church at Melchester.’
‘Sue, Sue—affliction 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
affection 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 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 off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it;
and now you go back upon yourself. I confess I am utterly
stultified 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 profit 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 coffee-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
distastefully as I have done! Perhaps as we couldn’t
conscientiously marry at first in the old-fashioned way, we
ought to have parted. Perhaps the world is not illuminated
enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to
think we could act as pioneers!’
‘I am so glad you see that much, at any rate. I never
deliberately meant to do as I did. I slipped into my false
position through jealousy and agitation!’
‘But surely through love—you loved me?’
‘Yes. But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as
mere lovers; until—’
‘But people in love couldn’t live for ever like that!’
‘Women could: men can’t because they—won’t. An
average woman is in this superior to an average man—that
she never instigates, only responds. We ought to have lived
in mental communion, and no more.’
‘I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said
before! … Well, as you will! … But human nature can’t help
being itself.’
‘O yes—that’s just what it has to learn—self-mastery.’
‘I repeat—if either were to blame it was not you but I.’
‘No—it was I. Your wickedness was only the natural man’s
desire to possess the woman. Mine was not the reciprocal
wish till envy stimulated me to oust Arabella. I had thought I
ought in charity to let you approach me—that it was
damnably selfish to torture you as I did my other friend. But
I shouldn’t have given way if you hadn’t broken me down by
making me fear you would go back to her.… But don’t let us
say any more about it! Jude, will you leave me to myself
now?’
‘Yes.… But Sue—my wife, as you are!’ he burst out; ‘my
old reproach to you was, after all, a true one. You have
never loved me as I love you—never—never! Yours is not a
passionate heart—your heart does not burn in a flame! You
are, upon the whole, a sort of fay,26 or sprite—not a woman!’
‘At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first
knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly
flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines
some women’s morals almost more than unbridled passion
—the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the
injury it may do the man—was in me; and when I found I
had caught you, I was frightened. And then—I don’t know
how it was—I couldn’t bear to let you go—possibly to
Arabella again—and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see,
however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel
wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine
ache for you.’
‘And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!’
‘Ah—yes! The further I flounder, the more harm I do!’
‘O Sue!’ said he with a sudden sense of his own danger.
‘Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons! You have
been my social salvation. Stay with me for humanity’s sake!
You know what a weak fellow I am. My two Arch Enemies
you know—my weakness for womankind and my impulse to
strong liquor. Don’t abandon me to them, Sue, to save your
own soul only! They have been kept entirely at a distance
since you became my guardian-angel! Since I have had you
I have been able to go into any temptations of the sort,
without risk. Isn’t my safety worth a little sacrifice of
dogmatic principle? I am in terror lest, if you leave me, it will
be with me another case of the pig that was washed turning
back to his wallowing in the mire!’
Sue burst out weeping. ‘O but you must not, Jude! You
won’t! I’ll pray for you night and day!’
‘Well—never mind; don’t grieve,’ said Jude generously. ‘I
did suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I
suffer again. But perhaps not so much as you. The woman
mostly gets the worst of it in the long run!’
‘She does.’
‘Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible. And
this one is not that, anyhow!’
Sue drew a nervous breath or two. ‘She is—I fear! … Now
Jude—good-night,—please!’
‘I mustn’t stay?—Not just once more? As it has been so
many times—O Sue, my wife, why not!’
‘No—no—not wife! … I am in your hands, Jude—don’t
tempt me back now I have advanced so far!’
‘Very well. I do your bidding. I owe that to you, darling, in
penance for how I over-ruled it at the first time. My God,
how selfish I was! Perhaps—perhaps I spoilt one of the
highest and purest loves that ever existed between man
and woman! … Then let the veil of our temple be rent in two
from this hour!27
He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows
thereon, and flung it to the floor.
Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept
silently. ‘You don’t see that it is a matter of conscience with
me, and not of 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.

VI–4
The 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 watching 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 gruffly. ‘Of somebody I saw to-
day.’ 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 Alfredston 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.
‘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
schoolmaster 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 affliction?’
 ‘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 affliction at losing Cartlett,
only hers is of a more ’sterical28 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 off 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.’
They parted. When Phillotson had ascended the hill a few
steps he stopped, hastened back, and called her.
‘What is, or was, their address?’
Arabella gave it.
‘Thank you. Good afternoon.’
Arabella smiled grimly as she resumed her way, and
practised dimple-making all along the road from where the
pollard willows begin to the old almshouses in the first street
of the town.
Meanwhile Phillotson ascended to Marygreen, and for the
first time during a lengthened period he lived with a forward
eye. On crossing under the large trees of the green to the
humble schoolhouse to which he had been reduced he stood
a moment, and pictured Sue coming out of the door to meet
him. No man had ever suffered more inconvenience from his
own charity, Christian or heathen, than Phillotson had done
in letting Sue go. He had been knocked about from pillar to
post at the hands of the virtuous almost beyond endurance;
he had been nearly starved, and was now dependent
entirely upon the very small stipend from the school of this
village (where the parson had got ill-spoken of for
befriending him). He had often thought of Arabella’s
remarks that he should have been more severe with Sue,
that her recalcitrant spirit would soon have been broken. Yet
such was his obstinate and illogical disregard of opinion, and
of the principles in which he had been trained, that his
convictions on the rightness of his course with his wife had
not been disturbed.
Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one
direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another.
The instincts which had allowed him to give Sue her liberty
now enabled him to regard her as none the worse for her life
with Jude. He wished for her still, in his curious way, if he did
not love her, and, apart from policy, soon felt that he would
be gratified to have her again as his, always provided that
she came willingly.
But artifice was necessary, he had found, for stemming
the cold and inhumane blast of the world’s contempt. And
here were the materials ready made. By getting Sue back
and re-marrying her on the respectable plea of having
entertained erroneous views of her, and gained his divorce
wrongfully, he might acquire some comfort, resume his old
courses, perhaps return to the Shaston school, if not even to
the Church as a licentiate.
He thought he would write to Gillingham to inquire his
views, and what he thought of his, Phillotson’s, sending a
letter to her. Gillingham replied, naturally, that now she was
gone it were best to let her be; and considered that if she
were anybody’s wife she was the wife of the man to whom
she had borne three children and owed such tragical
adventures. Probably, as his attachment to her seemed
unusually strong, the singular pair would make their union
legal in course of time, and all would be well, and decent,
and in order.
‘But they won’t—Sue won’t!’ exclaimed Phillotson to
himself. ‘Gillingham is so matter-of-fact. She’s affected by
Christminster sentiment and teaching. I can see her views
on the indissolubility of marriage well enough, and I know
where she got them. They are not mine; but I shall make
use of them to further mine.’
He wrote a brief reply to Gillingham. ‘I know I am entirely
wrong, but I don’t agree with you. As to her having lived
with and had three children by him, my feeling is (though I
can advance no logical or moral defence of it, on the old
lines) that it has done little more than finish her education. I
shall write to her, and learn whether what that woman said
is true or no.’
As he had made up his mind to do this before he had
written to his friend, there had not been much reason for
writing to the latter at all. However, it was Phillotson’s way
to act thus.
He accordingly addressed a carefully considered epistle to
Sue, and, knowing her emotional temperament, threw a
Rhadamanthine29 strictness into the lines here and there,
carefully hiding his heterodox feelings, not to frighten her.
He stated that, it having come to his knowledge that her
views had considerably changed, he felt compelled to say
that his own, too, were largely modified by events
subsequent to their parting. He would not conceal from her
that passionate love had little to do with his communication.
It arose from a wish to make their lives, if not a success, at
least no such disastrous failure as they threatened to
become, through his acting on what he had considered at
the time a principle of justice, charity, and reason.
To indulge one’s instinctive and uncontrolled sense of
justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with
impunity in an old civilization like ours. It was necessary to
act under an acquired and cultivated sense of the same, if
you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and
honour; and to let crude loving-kindness take care of itself.
He suggested that she should come to him there at
Marygreen.
On second thoughts he took out the last paragraph but
one; and having re-written the letter he despatched it
immediately, and in some excitement awaited the issue.

A few days after a figure moved through the white fog which
enveloped the Beersheba suburb of Christminster, towards
the quarter in which Jude Fawley had taken up his lodging
since his division from Sue. A timid knock sounded upon the
door of his abode.
It was evening—so he was at home; and by a species of
divination he jumped up and rushed to the door himself.
‘Will you come out with me? I would rather not come in. I
want to—to talk with you—and to go with you to the
cemetery.’
It had been in the trembling accents of Sue that these
words came. Jude put on his hat. ‘It is dreary for you to be
out,’ he said. ‘But if you prefer not to come in, I don’t mind.’
‘Yes—I do. I shall not keep you long.’
Jude was too much affected to go on talking at first; she,
too, was now such a mere cluster of nerves that all initiatory
power seemed to have left her, and they proceeded through
the fog like Acherontic30 shades for a long while, without
sound or gesture.
‘I want to tell you,” she presently said, her voice now
quick, now slow, ‘so that you may not hear of it by chance. I
am going back to Richard. He has—so magnanimously—
agreed to forgive all—’
‘Going back? How can you go—’
‘He is going to marry me again. That is for form’s sake,
and to satisfy the world, which does not see things as they
are. But of course I am his wife already. Nothing has
changed that.’
He turned upon her with an anguish that was well-nigh
fierce.
‘But you are my wife! Yes, you are. You know it. I have
always regretted that feint of ours in going away and
pretending to come back legally married, to save
appearances. I loved you, and you loved me; and we closed
with each other; and that made the marriage. We still love—
you as well as I—I know it, Sue! Therefore our marriage is
not cancelled.’
‘Yes; I know how you see it,’ she answered with despairing
self-suppression. ‘But I am going to marry him again, as it
would be called by you. Strictly speaking you, too,—don’t
mind my saying it, Jude!—you should take back—Arabella.’
‘I should? Good God—what next! But how if you and I had
married legally, as we were on the point of doing?’
‘I should have felt just the same—that ours was not a
marriage. And I would go back to Richard without repeating
the sacrament, if he asked me. But “the world and its ways
have a certain worth”31 (I suppose): therefore I concede a
repetition of the ceremony.… Don’t crush all the life out of
me by satire and argument, I implore you! I was strongest
once, I know, and perhaps I treated you cruelly. But Jude,
return good for evil! I am the weaker now. Don’t retaliate
upon me, but be kind. O be kind to me—a poor wicked
woman who is trying to mend!’
He shook his head hopelessly, his eyes wet. The blow of
her bereavement seemed to have destroyed her reasoning
faculty. The once keen vision was dimmed. ‘All wrong, all
wrong!’ he said huskily. ‘Error—perversity! It drives me out
of my senses. Do you care for him? Do you love him? You
know you don’t! It will be a fanatic prostitution—God forgive
me, yes—that’s what it will be!’
‘I don’t love him—I must, must, own it, in deepest
remorse! But I shall try to learn to love him by obeying him.’
Jude argued, urged, implored; but her conviction was
proof against all. It seemed to be the one thing on earth on
which she was firm, and that her firmness in this had left her
tottering in every other impulse and wish she possessed.
‘I have been considerate enough to let you know the
whole truth, and to tell it you myself,’ she said in cut tones;
‘that you might not consider yourself slighted by hearing of
it at second-hand. I have even owned the extreme fact that I
do not love him. I did not think you would be so rough with
me for doing so! I was going to ask you …’
‘To give you away?’
‘No. To send—my boxes to me—if you would. But I
suppose you won’t.’
‘Why, of course I will. What—isn’t he coming to fetch you
—to marry you from here? He won’t condescend to do that?’
‘No—I won’t let him. I go to him voluntarily, just as I went
away from him. We are to be married at his little church at
Marygreen.’
She was so sadly sweet in what he called her wrong-
headedness that Jude could not help being moved to tears
more than once for pity of her. ‘I never knew such a woman
for doing impulsive penances as you, Sue! No sooner does
one expect you to go straight on, as the one rational
proceeding, than you double round the corner!’
‘Ah, well; let that go! … Jude, I must say good-bye! But I
wanted you to go to the cemetery with me. Let our farewell
be there—beside the graves of those who died to bring
home to me the error of my views.’
They turned in the direction of the place, and the gate
was opened to them on application. Sue had been there
often, and she knew the way to the spot in the dark. They
reached it, and stood still.
‘It is here—I should like to part,’ said she.
‘So be it!’
‘Don’t think me hard because I have acted on conviction.
Your generous devotion to me is unparalleled, Jude! Your
worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather
than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest
among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly
good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man.
The devoted fail.… “Charity seeketh not her own.” ’32
‘In that chapter we are at one, ever beloved darling, and
on it we’ll part friends. Its verses will stand fast when all the
rest that you call religion has passed away!’
‘Well—don’t discuss it. Good-bye, Jude; my fellow-sinner,
and kindest friend!”
‘Good-bye, my mistaken wife. Good-bye!’

VI–5
The next afternoon the familiar Christminster fog still hung
over all things. Sue’s slim shape was only just discernible
going towards the station.
Jude had no heart to go to his work that day. Neither could
he go anywhere in the direction by which she would be likely
to pass. He went in an opposite one, to a dreary, strange,
flat scene, where boughs dripped, and coughs and
consumptions lurked, and where he had never been before.
‘Sue’s gone from me—gone!’ he murmured miserably.
She in the meantime had left by the train, and reached
Alfredston Road, where she entered the steam-tram and
was conveyed into the town. It had been her request to
Phillotson that he should not meet her. She wished, she
said, to come to him voluntarily, to his very house and
hearthstone.
 It was Friday evening, which had been chosen because
the schoolmaster was disengaged at four o’clock that day
till the Monday morning following. The little car33 she hired
at The Bear to drive her to Marygreen set her down at the
end of the lane, half-a-mile from the village, by her desire,
and preceded her to the school-house with such portion of
her luggage as she had brought. On its return she
encountered it, and asked the driver if he had found the
master’s house open. The man informed her that he had,
and that her things had been taken in by the schoolmaster
himself.
She could now enter Marygreen without exciting much
observation. She crossed by the well and under the trees to
the pretty new school on the other side, and lifted the latch
of the dwelling without knocking. Phillotson stood in the
middle of the room, awaiting her, as requested.
‘I’ve come, Richard,’ said she, looking pale and shaken,
and sinking into a chair. ‘I cannot believe—you forgive your
—wife!’
‘Everything, darling Susanna,’ said Phillotson.
She started at the endearment, though it had been
spoken advisedly without fervour. Then she nerved herself
again.
‘My children—are dead—and it is right that they should
be! I am glad—almost. They were sin-begotten. They were
sacrificed to teach me how to live!—their death was the first
stage of my purification. That’s why they have not died in
vain! … You will take me back?’
He was so stirred by her pitiful words and tone that he did
more than he had meant to do. He bent and kissed her
cheek.
Sue imperceptibly shrank away, her flesh quivering under
the touch of his lips.
Phillotson’s heart sank, for desire was renascent in him.
‘You still have an aversion to me!’
 ‘O no, dear—I—have been driving through the damp, and
I was chilly!’ she said, with a hurried smile of apprehension.
‘When are we going to have the marriage? Soon?’
‘To-morrow morning, early, I thought—if you really wish. I
am sending round to the vicar to let him know you are
come. I have told him all, and he highly approves—he says
it will bring our lives to a triumphant and satisfactory issue.
But—are you sure of yourself? It is not too late to refuse now
if—you think you can’t bring yourself to it, you know?’
‘Yes, yes, I can! I want it done quick. Tell him, tell him at
once! My strength is tried by the undertaking—I can’t wait
long!’
‘Have something to eat and drink then, and go over to
your room at Mrs. Edlin’s. I’ll tell the vicar half-past eight to-
morrow, before anybody is about—if that’s not too soon for
you? My friend Gillingham is here to help us in the
ceremony. He’s been good enough to come all the way from
Shaston at great inconvenience to himself.’
Unlike a woman in ordinary, whose eye is so keen for
material things, Sue seemed to see nothing of the room
they were in, or any detail of her environment. But on
moving across the parlour to put down her muff she uttered
a little ‘O!’ and grew paler than before. Her look was that of
the condemned criminal who catches sight of his coffin.
‘What?’ said Phillotson.
The flap of the bureau chanced to be open, and in placing
her muff upon it her eye had caught a document which lay
there. ‘O—only a—funny surprise!’ she said, trying to laugh
away her cry as she came back to the table.
‘Ah! yes,’ said Phillotson. ‘The license.… It has just come.’
Gillingham now joined them from his room above, and
Sue nervously made herself agreeable to him by talking on
whatever she thought likely to interest him, except herself,
though that interested him most of all. She obediently ate
some supper, and prepared to leave for her lodging hard by.
Phillotson crossed the green with her, bidding her good-
night at Mrs. Edlin’s door.
The old woman accompanied Sue to her temporary
quarters, and helped her to unpack. Among other things she
laid out a nightgown tastefully embroidered.
‘O—I didn’t know that was put in!’ said Sue quickly. ‘I
didn’t mean it to be. Here is a different one.’ She handed a
new and absolutely plain garment, of coarse and
unbleached calico.
‘But this is the prettiest,’ said Mrs. Edlin. ‘That one is no
better than very sackcloth34 o’ Scripture!’
‘Yes—I meant it to be. Give me the other.’
She took it, and began rending it with all her might, the
tears resounding through the house like a screech-owl.
‘But my dear, dear!—whatever …’
‘It is adulterous! It signifies what I don’t feel—I bought it
long ago—to please Jude! It must be destroyed!’
Mrs. Edlin lifted her hands, and Sue excitedly continued to
tear the linen into strips, laying the pieces in the fire.
‘You med ha’ give it to me!’ said the widow. ‘It do make
my heart ache to see such pretty open-work as that a-
burned by the flames—not that ornamental night-rails35 can
be much use to a’ ould ’ooman like I. My days for such be all
past and gone!’
‘It is an accursed thing—it reminds me of what I want to
forget!’ Sue repeated. ‘It is only fit for the fire.’
‘Lord, you be too strict! What do ye use such words for,
and condemn to hell your dear little innocent children that’s
lost to ’ee! Upon my life I don’t call that religion!’
Sue flung her face upon the bed, sobbing. ‘O, don’t, don’t!
That kills me!’ She remained shaken with her grief, and
slipped down upon her knees.
‘I’ll tell ’ee what—you ought not to marry this man again!’
said Mrs. Edlin indignantly. ‘You are in love wi’ t’ other still!’
‘Yes I must—I am his already!’
 ‘Pshoo! You be t’ other man’s. If you didn’t like to commit
yourselves to the binding vow again, just at first, ’twas all
the more credit to your consciences, considering your
reasons, and you med ha’ lived on, and made it all right at
last. After all, it concerned nobody but your own two selves.’
‘Richard says he’ll have me back, and I’m bound to go! If
he had refused, it might not have been so much my duty to
—give up Jude. But—’ She remained with her face in the
bedclothes, and Mrs. Edlin left the room.
Phillotson in the interval had gone back to his friend
Gillingham, who still sat over the supper-table. They soon
rose, and walked out on the green to smoke awhile. A light
was burning in Sue’s room, a shadow moving now and then
across the blind.
Gillingham had evidently been impressed with the
indefinable charm of Sue, and after a silence he said, ‘Well:
you’ve all but got her again at last. She can’t very well go a
second time. The pear has dropped into your hand.’
‘Yes! … I suppose I am right in taking her at her word. I
confess there seems a touch of selfishness in it. Apart from
her being what she is, of course, a luxury for a fogey36 like
me, it will set me right in the eyes of the clergy and
orthodox laity, who have never forgiven me for letting her
go. So I may get back in some degree into my old track.’
‘Well—if you’ve got any sound reason for marrying her
again, do it now in God’s name! I was always against your
opening the cage-door and letting the bird go in such an
obviously suicidal way. You might have been a school
inspector by this time, or a reverend, if you hadn’t been so
weak about her.’
‘I did myself irreparable damage—I know it.’
‘Once you’ve got her housed again, stick to her.’
Phillotson was more evasive to-night. He did not care to
admit clearly that his taking Sue to him again had at bottom
nothing to do with repentance of letting her go, but was,
primarily, a human instinct flying in the face of custom and
profession. He said, ‘Yes—I shall do that. I know woman
better now. Whatever justice there was in releasing her,
there was little logic, for one holding my views on other
subjects.’
Gillingham looked at him, and wondered whether it would
ever happen that the reactionary spirit induced by the
world’s sneers and his own physical wishes would make
Phillotson more orthodoxly cruel to her than he had
erstwhile been informally and perversely kind.
‘I perceive it won’t do to give way to impulse,’ Phillotson
resumed, feeling more and more every minute the necessity
of acting up to his position. ‘I flew in the face of the Church’s
teaching; but I did it without malice prepense.37 Women are
so strange in their influence, that they tempt you to
misplaced kindness. However, I know myself better now. A
little judicious severity, perhaps.…’
‘Yes; but you must tighten the reins by degrees only.
Don’t be too strenuous at first. She’ll come to any terms in
time.’
The caution was unnecessary, though Phillotson did not
say so. ‘I remember what my vicar at Shaston said, when I
left after the row that was made about my agreeing to her
elopement. “The only thing you can do to retrieve your
position and hers is to admit your error in not restraining her
with a wise and strong hand, and to get her back again if
she’ll come, and be firm in the future.” But I was so
headstrong at that time that I paid no heed. And that after
the divorce she should have thought of doing so I did not
dream.’
The gate of Mrs. Edlin’s cottage clicked, and somebody
began crossing in the direction of the school. Phillotson said
‘Good-night.’
‘O, is that Mr. Phillotson,’ said Mrs. Edlin. ‘I was going over
to see ’ee. I’ve been upstairs with her, helping her to unpack
her things; and upon my word, sir, I don’t think this ought to
be!’
 ‘What—the wedding?’
‘Yes. She’s forcing herself to it, poor dear little thing; and
you’ve no notion what she’s suffering. I was never much for
religion nor against it, but it can’t be right to let her do this,
and you ought to persuade her out of it. Of course
everybody will say it was very good and forgiving of ’ee to
take her to ’ee again. But for my part I don’t.’
‘It’s her wish, and I am willing,’ said Phillotson with grave
reserve, opposition making him illogically tenacious now. ‘A
great piece of laxity will be rectified.’
‘I don’t believe it. She’s his wife if anybody’s. She’s had
three children by him, and he loves her dearly; and it’s a
wicked shame to egg her on to this, poor little quivering
thing! She’s got nobody on her side. The one man who’d be
her friend the obstinate creature won’t allow to come near
her. What first put her into this mood o’ mind, I wonder!’
‘I can’t tell. Not I certainly. It is all voluntary on her part.
Now that’s all I have to say.’ Phillotson spoke stiffly. ‘You’ve
turned round, Mrs. Edlin. It is unseemly of you!’
‘Well. I knowed you’d be affronted at what I had to say;
but I don’t mind that. The truth’s the truth.’
‘I’m not affronted, Mrs. Edlin. You’ve been too kind a
neighbour for that. But I must be allowed to know what’s
best for myself and Susanna. I suppose you won’t go to
church with us, then?’
‘No. Be hanged if I can.… I don’t know what the times be
coming to! Matrimony have growed to be that serious in
these days that one really do feel afeard to move in it at all.
In my time we took it more careless; and I don’t know that
we was any the worse for it! When I and my poor man were
jined in it we kept up the junketing38 all the week, and drunk
the parish dry, and had to borrow half-a-crown to begin
housekeeping!’
When Mrs. Edlin had gone back to her cottage Phillotson
spoke moodily. ‘I don’t know whether I ought to do it—at any
rate quite so rapidly.’
 ‘Why?’
‘If she is really compelling herself to this against her
instincts—merely from this new sense of duty or religion—I
ought perhaps to let her wait a bit.’
‘Now you’ve got so far you ought not to back out of it.
That’s my opinion.’
‘I can’t very well put it off now; that’s true. But I had a
qualm when she gave that little cry at sight of the license.’
‘Now, never you have qualms, old boy. I mean to give her
away tomorrow morning, and you mean to take her. It has
always been on my conscience that I didn’t urge more
objections to your letting her go, and now we’ve got to this
stage I shan’t be content if I don’t help you to set the matter
right.’
Phillotson nodded, and seeing how staunch his friend was,
became more frank. ‘No doubt when it gets known what I’ve
done I shall be thought a soft fool by many. But they don’t
know Sue as I do. Though so elusive, hers is such an honest
nature at bottom that I don’t think she has ever done
anything against her conscience. The fact of her having
lived with Fawley goes for nothing. At the time she left me
for him she thought she was quite within her right. Now she
thinks otherwise.’
The next morning came, and the self-sacrifice of the
woman on the altar of what she was pleased to call her
principles was acquiesced in by these two friends, each from
his own point of view. Phillotson went across to the Widow
Edlin’s to fetch Sue a few minutes after eight o’clock. The
fog of the previous day or two on the lowlands had travelled
up here by now, and the trees on the green caught armfuls,
and turned them into showers of big drops. The bride was
waiting, ready; bonnet and all on. She had never in her life
looked so much like the lily her name connoted39 as she did
in that pallid morning light. Chastened, world-weary,
remorseful, the strain on her nerves had preyed upon her
flesh and bones, and she appeared smaller in outline than
she had formerly done, though Sue had not been a large
woman in her days of rudest health.
‘Prompt,’ said the schoolmaster, magnanimously taking
her hand. But he checked his impulse to kiss her,
remembering her start of yesterday, which unpleasantly
lingered in his mind.
Gillingham joined them, and they left the house, Widow
Edlin continuing steadfast in her refusal to assist in the
ceremony.
‘Where is the church?’ said Sue. She had not lived there
for any length of time since the old church was pulled down,
and in her preoccupation forgot the new one.
‘Up here,’ said Phillotson; and presently the tower loomed
large and solemn in the fog. The vicar had already crossed
to the building, and when they entered he said pleasantly:
‘We almost want candles.’
‘You do—wish me to be yours, Richard?’ gasped Sue in a
whisper.
‘Certainly, dear: above all things in the world.’
Sue said no more; and for the second or third time he felt
he was not quite following out the humane instinct which
had induced him to let her go.
There they stood, five altogether: the parson, the clerk,
the couple and Gillingham; and the holy ordinance was re-
solemnized forthwith. In the nave of the edifice were two or
three villagers, and when the clergyman came to the words,
‘What God hath joined,’ a woman’s voice from among these
was heard to utter audibly:
‘God hath jined indeed!’
It was like a re-enactment by the ghosts of their former
selves of the similar scene which had taken place at
Melchester years before. When the books were signed the
vicar congratulated the husband and wife on having
performed a noble, and righteous, and mutually forgiving
act. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said smiling. ‘May you long
be happy together, after thus having been “saved as by
fire.” ’40
They came down the nearly empty building, and crossed
to the schoolhouse. Gillingham wanted to get home that
night, and left early. He, too, congratulated the couple.
‘Now,’ he said in parting from Phillotson, who walked out a
little way, ‘I shall be able to tell the people in your native
place a good round tale; and they’ll all say “Well done,”
depend on it.’
When the schoolmaster got back Sue was making a
pretence of doing some housewifery as if she lived there.
But she seemed timid at his approach, and compunction
wrought on him at sight of it.
‘Of course, my dear, I shan’t expect to intrude upon your
personal privacy any more than I did before,’ he said
gravely. ‘It is for our good socially to do this, and that’s its
justification, if it was not my reason.’
Sue brightened a little.

VI–6
The place was the door of Jude’s lodging in the outskirts of
Christminster—far from the precincts of St. Silas’ where he
had formerly lived, which saddened him to sickness. The
rain was coming down. A woman in shabby black stood on
the doorstep talking to Jude, who held the door in his hand.
‘I am lonely, destitute, and houseless—that’s what I am!
Father has turned me out of doors after borrowing every
penny I’d got, to put it into his business, and then accusing
me of laziness when I was only waiting for a situation. I am
at the mercy of the world! If you can’t take me and help me,
Jude, I must go to the workhouse, or to something worse.
Only just now two undergraduates winked at me as I came
along. ’Tis hard for a woman to keep virtuous where there’s
so many young men!’
 The woman in the rain who spoke thus was Arabella, the
evening being that of the day after Sue’s re-marriage with
Phillotson.
‘I am sorry for you, but I am only in lodgings,’ said Jude
coldly.
‘Then you turn me away?’
‘I’ll give you enough to get food and lodging for a few
days.’
‘O, but can’t you have the kindness to take me in? I
cannot endure going to a public-house to lodge; and I am so
lonely. Please, Jude, for old times’ sake!’
‘No, no,’ said Jude hastily. ‘I don’t want to be reminded of
those things; and if you talk about them I shall not help
you.’
‘Then I suppose I must go!’ said Arabella. She bent her
head against the doorpost and began sobbing.
‘The house is full,’ said Jude. ‘And I have only a little extra
room to my own—not much more than a closet—where I
keep my tools, and templates,41 and the few books I have
left!’
‘That would be a palace for me!’
‘There is no bedstead in it.’
‘A bit of a bed could be made on the floor. It would be
good enough for me.’
Unable to be harsh with her, and not knowing what to do,
Jude called the man who let the lodgings, and said this was
an acquaintance of his in great distress for want of
temporary shelter.
‘You may remember me as barmaid at the Lamb and Flag
formerly?’ spoke up Arabella. ‘My father has insulted me this
afternoon, and I’ve left him, though without a penny!’
The householder said he could not recall her features.
‘But still, if you are a friend of Mr. Fawley’s we’ll do what we
can for a day or two—if he’ll make himself answerable?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Jude. ‘She has really taken me quite
unawares; but I should wish to help her out of her difficulty.’
And an arrangement was ultimately come to under which a
bed was to be thrown down in Jude’s lumber-room, to make
it comfortable for Arabella till she could get out of the strait
she was in—not by her own fault, as she declared—and
return to her father’s again.
While they were waiting for this to be done Arabella said:
‘You know the news, I suppose?’
‘I guess what you mean; but I know nothing.’
‘I had a letter from Anny at Alfredston to-day. She had just
heard that the wedding was to be yesterday: but she didn’t
know if it had come off.’
‘I don’t wish to talk of it.’
‘No, no: of course you don’t. Only it shows what kind of
woman—’
‘Don’t speak of her I say! She’s a fool!—And she’s an
angel, too, poor dear!’
‘If it’s done, he’ll have a chance of getting back to his old
position, by everybody’s account, so Anny says. All his well-
wishers will be pleased, including the bishop himself.’
‘Do spare me, Arabella.’
Arabella was duly installed in the little attic, and at first
she did not come near Jude at all. She went to and fro about
her own business, which, when they met for a moment on
the stairs or in the passage, she informed him was that of
obtaining another place in the occupation she understood
best. When Jude suggested London as affording the most
likely opening in the liquor trade, she shook her head. ‘No—
the temptations are too many,’ she said. ‘Any humble
tavern in the country before that for me.’
On the Sunday morning following, when he breakfasted
later than on other days, she meekly asked him if she might
come in to breakfast with him, as she had broken her
teapot, and could not replace it immediately, the shops
being shut.
‘Yes, if you like,’ he said indifferently.
 While they sat without speaking she suddenly observed:
‘You seem all in a brood, old man. I’m sorry for you.’
‘I am all in a brood.’
‘It is about her, I know. It’s no business of mine, but I
could find out all about the wedding—if it really did take
place—if you wanted to know.’
‘How could you?’
‘I wanted to go to Alfredston to get a few things I left
there. And I could see Anny, who’ll be sure to have heard all
about it, as she has friends at Marygreen.’
Jude could not bear to acquiesce in this proposal; but his
suspense pitted itself against his discretion, and won in the
struggle. ‘You can ask about it if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve not
heard a sound from there. It must have been very private, if
—they have married.’
‘I am afraid I haven’t enough cash to take me there and
back, or I should have gone before. I must wait till I have
earned some.’
‘O—I can pay the journey for you,’ he said impatiently.
And thus his suspense as to Sue’s welfare, and the possible
marriage, moved him to dispatch for intelligence the last
emissary he would have thought of choosing deliberately.
Arabella went, Jude requesting her to be home not later
than by the seven o’clock train. When she had gone he said:
‘Why should I have charged her to be back by a particular
time! She’s nothing to me:—nor the other neither!’
But having finished work he could not help going to the
station to meet Arabella, dragged thither by feverish haste
to get the news she might bring, and know the worst.
Arabella had made dimples most successfully all the way
home, and when she stepped out of the railway carriage she
smiled. He merely said ‘Well?’ with the very reverse of a
smile.
‘They are married.’
‘Yes—of course they are!’ he returned. She observed,
however, the hard strain upon his lip as he spoke.
 ‘Anny says she has heard from Belinda, her relation out at
Marygreen, that it was very sad, and curious!’
‘How do you mean sad? She wanted to marry him again,
didn’t she?—and he her!’
‘Yes—that was it. She wanted to in one sense, but not in
the other. Mrs. Edlin was much upset by it all, and spoke out
her mind at Phillotson. But Sue was that excited about it
that she burnt her best embroidery that she’d worn with
you, to blot you out entirely. Well—if a woman feels like it,
she ought to do it. I commend her for it, though others
don’t.’ Arabella sighed. ‘She felt he was her only husband,
and that she belonged to nobody else in the sight of God
A’mighty while he lived. Perhaps another woman feels the
same about herself, too!’ Arabella sighed again.
‘I don’t want any cant!’ exclaimed Jude.
“It isn’t cant,’ said Arabella. ‘I feel exactly the same as
she!’
He closed that issue by remarking abruptly: ‘Well—now I
know all I wanted to know. Many thanks for your
information. I am not going back to my lodgings just yet.’
And he left her straightway.
In his misery and depression Jude walked to well-nigh
every spot in the city that he had visited with Sue; thence
he did not know whither, and then thought of going home to
his usual evening meal. But having all the vices of his
virtues, and some to spare, he turned into a public-house,
for the first time during many months. Among the possible
consequences of her marriage Sue had not dwelt on this.
Arabella, meanwhile, had gone back. The evening passed,
and Jude did not return. At half-past nine Arabella herself
went out, first proceeding to an out-lying district near the
river where her father lived, and had opened a small and
precarious pork-shop lately.
‘Well,’ she said to him, ‘for all your rowing42 me that night,
I’ve called in, for I have something to tell you. I think I shall
get married and settled again. Only you must help me: and
you can do no less, after what I’ve stood ’ee.’
‘I’ll do anything to get thee off my hands!’
‘Very well. I am now going to look for my young man. He’s
on the loose I’m afraid, and I must get him home. All I want
you to do tonight is not to fasten the door, in case I should
want to sleep here, and should be late.’
‘I thought you’d soon get tired of giving yourself airs and
keeping away!’
‘Well—don’t do the door. That’s all I say.’
She then sallied out again, and first hastening back to
Jude’s to make sure that he had not returned, began her
search for him. A shrewd guess as to his probable course
took her straight to the tavern which Jude had formerly
frequented, and where she had been barmaid for a brief
term. She had no sooner opened the door of the ‘Private
Bar’ than her eyes fell upon him—sitting in the shade at the
back of the compartment, with his eyes fixed on the floor in
a blank stare. He was drinking nothing stronger than ale just
then. He did not observe her, and she entered and sat
beside him.
Jude looked up, and said without surprise: ‘You’ve come to
have something, Arabella? … I’m trying to forget her: that’s
all! But I can’t; and I am going home.’ She saw that he was
a little way on in liquor, but only a little as yet.
‘I’ve come entirely to look for you, dear boy. You are not
well. Now you must have something better than that.’
Arabella held up her finger to the barmaid. ‘You shall have a
liqueur—that’s better fit for a man of education than beer.
You shall have maraschino, or curaçoa dry or sweet, or
cherry brandy. I’ll treat you, poor chap!’
‘I don’t care which! Say cherry brandy.… Sue has served
me badly, very badly. I didn’t expect it of Sue! I stuck to her,
and she ought to have stuck to me. I’d have sold my soul for
her sake, but she wouldn’t risk hers a jot for me. To save her
own soul she lets mine go damn! … But it isn’t her fault,
poor little girl—I am sure it isn’t!’
How Arabella had obtained money did not appear, but she
ordered a liqueur each, and paid for them. When they had
drunk these Arabella suggested another; and Jude had the
pleasure of being, as it were, personally conducted through
the varieties of spirituous delectation by one who knew the
landmarks well. Arabella kept very considerably in the rear
of Jude; but though she only sipped where he drank, she
took as much as she could safely take without losing her
head—which was not a little, as the crimson upon her
countenance showed.
Her tone towards him to-night was uniformly soothing and
cajoling; and whenever he said ‘I don’t care what happens
to me,’ a thing he did continually, she replied, ‘But I do very
much!’ The closing hour came, and they were compelled to
turn out; whereupon Arabella put her arm round his waist,
and guided his unsteady footsteps.
When they were in the streets she said: ‘I don’t know
what our landlord will say to my bringing you home in this
state. I expect we are fastened out, so that he’ll have to
come down and let us in.’
‘I don’t know—I don’t know.’
‘That’s the worst of not having a home of your own. I tell
you, Jude, what we had best do. Come round to my father’s
—I made it up with him a bit to-day. I can let you in, and
nobody will see you at all; and by to-morrow morning you’ll
be all right.’
‘Anything—anywhere,’ replied Jude. ‘What the devil does
it matter to me?’
They went along together, like any other fuddling43
couple, her arm still round his waist, and his, at last, round
hers; though with no amatory intent; but merely because he
was weary, unstable, and in need of support.
‘This—is th’ Martyrs’—burning-place,’ he stammered as
they dragged across a broad street. ‘I remember—in old
Fuller’s Holy State44—and I am reminded of it—by our
passing by here—old Fuller in his Holy State says, that at the
burning of Ridley, Doctor Smith—preached sermon, and took
as his text “Though I give my body to be burned, and have
not charity, it profiteth me nothing,”45—Often think of it as I
pass here. Ridley was a—’
‘Yes. Exactly. Very thoughtful of you, deary, even though it
hasn’t much to do with our present business.’
‘Why, yes it has! I’m giving my body to be burned! But—
ah—you don’t understand!—it wants Sue to understand
such things! And I was her seducer—poor little girl! And
she’s gone—and I don’t care about myself! Do what you like
with me! … And yet she did it for conscience’ sake, poor
little Sue!’
‘Hang her!—I mean, I think she was right,’ hiccupped
Arabella. ‘I’ve my feelings too, like her; and I feel I belong to
you in Heaven’s eye, and to nobody else, till death us do
part!46 It is—hic—never too late—hic—to mend!47
They had reached her father’s house, and she softly
unfastened the door, groping about for a light within.
The circumstances were not altogether unlike those of
their entry into the cottage at Cresscombe, such a long time
before. Nor were perhaps Arabella’s motives. But Jude did
not think of that, though she did.
‘I can’t find the matches, dear,’ she said when she had
fastened up the door. ‘But never mind—this way. As quiet as
you can, please.’
‘It is as dark as pitch,’ said Jude.
‘Give me your hand, and I’ll lead you. That’s it. Just sit
down here, and I’ll pull off your boots. I don’t want to wake
him.’
‘Who?’
‘Father. He’d make a row, perhaps.’
She pulled off his boots. ‘Now,’ she whispered, ‘take hold
of me—never mind your weight. Now—first stair, second
stair—’
 ‘But,—are we out in our old house by Marygreen?’ asked
the stupefied Jude. ‘I haven’t been inside it for years till
now! Hey? And where are my books? That’s what I want to
know?’
‘We are at my house, dear, where there’s nobody to spy
out how ill you are. Now—third stair, fourth stair—that’s it.
Now we shall get on.’

VI–7
Arabella was preparing breakfast in the downstairs back
room of this small, recently hired tenement of her father’s.
She put her head into the little pork-shop in front, and told
Mr. Donn it was ready. Donn, endeavouring to look like a
master pork-butcher, in a greasy blue blouse, and with a
strap round his waist from which a steel48 dangled, came in
promptly.
‘You must mind the shop this morning,’ he said casually.
‘I’ve to go and get some inwards and half a pig from
Lumsdon, and to call elsewhere. If you live here you must
put your shoulder to the wheel, at least till I get the
business started!’
“Well, for to-day I can’t say.’ She looked deedily into his
face. ‘I’ve got a prize upstairs.’
‘Oh?—What’s that?’
‘A husband—almost.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. It’s Jude. He’s come back to me.’
‘Your old original one? Well, I’m damned!’
‘Well, I always did like him, that I will say.’
‘But how does he come to be up there?’ said Donn,
humour-struck, and nodding to the ceiling.
‘Don’t ask inconvenient questions, father. What we’ve to
do is to keep him here till he and I are—as we were.’
‘How was that?’
‘Married.’
 ‘Ah.… Well it is the rummest49 thing I ever heard of—
marrying an old husband again, and so much new blood in
the world! He’s no catch, to my thinking. I’d have had a new
one while I was about it.’
‘It isn’t rum for a woman to want her old husband back for
respectability, though for a man to want his old wife back—
well, perhaps it is funny, rather!’ And Arabella was suddenly
seized with a fit of loud laughter, in which her father joined
more moderately.
‘Be civil to him, and I’ll do the rest,’ she said when she
had recovered seriousness. ‘He told me this morning that
his head ached fit to burst, and he hardly seemed to know
where he was. And no wonder, considering how he mixed
his drink last night. We must keep him jolly and cheerful
here for a day or two, and not let him go back to his lodging.
Whatever you advance I’ll pay back to you again. But I must
go up and see how he is now, poor deary.’
Arabella ascended the stairs, softly opened the door of
the first bedroom, and peeped in. Finding that her shorn
Samson50 was asleep she entered to the bedside and stood
regarding him. The fevered flush on his face from the
debauch of the previous evening lessened the fragility of his
ordinary appearance, and his long lashes, dark brows, and
curly black hair and beard against the white pillow,
completed the physiognomy of one whom Arabella, as a
woman of rank passions, still felt it worth while to recapture,
highly important to recapture as a woman straitened both in
means and in reputation. Her ardent gaze seemed to affect
him; his quick breathing became suspended, and he opened
his eyes.
‘How are you now, dear?’ said she. ‘It is I—Arabella.’
‘Ah!—where—O yes, I remember! You gave me shelter.… I
am stranded—ill—demoralized—damn bad! That’s what I
am!’
‘Then do stay there. There’s nobody in the house but
father and me, and you can rest till you are thoroughly well.
I’ll tell them at the stone-works that you are knocked up.’51
‘I wonder what they are thinking at the lodgings!’
‘I’ll go round and explain. Perhaps you had better let me
pay up, or they’ll think we’ve run away?’
‘Yes. You’ll find enough money in my pocket there.’
Quite indifferent, and shutting his eyes because he could
not bear the daylight in his throbbing eyeballs, Jude seemed
to doze again. Arabella took his purse, softly left the room,
and putting on her outdoor things went off to the lodgings
she and he had quitted the evening before.
Scarcely half-an-hour had elapsed ere she reappeared
round the corner, walking beside a lad wheeling a truck on
which were piled all Jude’s household possessions, and also
the few of Arabella’s things which she had taken to the
lodging for her short sojourn there. Jude was in such
physical pain from his unfortunate breakdown of the
previous night, and in such mental pain from the loss of Sue
and from having yielded in his half-somnolent state to
Arabella, that when he saw his few chattels unpacked and
standing before his eyes in this strange bedroom,
intermixed with woman’s apparel, he scarcely considered
how they had come there, or what their coming signalized.
‘Now,’ said Arabella to her father downstairs, ‘we must
keep plenty of good liquor going in the house these next few
days. I know his nature, and if he once gets into that
fearfully low state that he does get into sometimes, he’ll
never do the honourable thing by me in this world, and I
shall be left in the lurch. He must be kept cheerful. He has a
little money in the savings-bank, and he has given me his
purse to pay for anything necessary. Well, that will be the
license; for I must have that ready at hand, to catch him the
moment he’s in the humour. You must pay for the liquor. A
few friends, and a quiet convivial party would be the thing, if
we could get it up. It would advertise the shop, and help me
too.’
 ‘That can be got up easy enough by anybody who’ll afford
victuals and drink.… Well yes—it would advertise the shop—
that’s true.’
Three days later, when Jude had recovered somewhat
from the fearful throbbing of his eyes and brain, but was still
considerably confused in his mind by what had been
supplied to him by Arabella during the interval—to keep him
jolly, as she expressed it—the quiet convivial gathering
suggested by her, to wind Jude up to the striking point, took
place.
Donn had only just opened his miserable little pork and
sausage shop, which had as yet scarce any customers;
nevertheless that party advertised it well, and the Donns
acquired a real notoriety among a certain class in
Christminster who knew not the colleges, nor their works,
nor their ways. Jude was asked if he could suggest any
guest in addition to those named by Arabella and her father,
and in a saturnine humour of perfect recklessness
mentioned Uncle Joe, and Stagg, and the decayed
auctioneer, and others whom he remembered as having
been frequenters of the well-known tavern during his bout
therein years before. He also suggested Freckles and Bower
o’ Bliss. Arabella took him at his word so far as the men
went, but drew the line at the ladies.
Another man they knew, Tinker Taylor, though he lived in
the same street, was not invited; but as he went homeward
from a late job on the evening of the party, he had occasion
to call at the shop for trotters. There were none in, but he
was promised some the next morning. While making his
inquiry Taylor glanced into the back room, and saw the
guests sitting round, card-playing, and drinking, and
otherwise enjoying themselves at Donn’s expense. He went
home to bed, and on his way out next morning wondered
how the party went off. He thought it hardly worth while to
call at the shop for his provisions at that hour, Donn and his
daughter being probably not up, if they caroused late the
night before. However, he found in passing that the door
was open, and he could hear voices within, though the
shutters of the meat-stall were not down. He went and
tapped at the sitting-room door, and opened it.
‘Well—to be sure!’ he said, astonished.
Hosts and guests were sitting card-playing, smoking, and
talking, precisely as he had left them eleven hours earlier;
the gas was burning and the curtains drawn, though it had
been broad daylight for two hours out of doors.
‘Yes!’ cried Arabella, laughing. ‘Here we are, just the
same. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, oughtn’t we!
But it is a sort of housewarming, you see; and our friends
are in no hurry. Come in, Mr. Taylor, and sit down.’
The tinker, or rather reduced ironmonger, was nothing
loth, and entered and took a seat. ‘I shall lose a quarter,52
but never mind,’ he said. ‘Well, really, I could hardly believe
my eyes when I looked in! It seemed as if I was flung back
again into last night, all of a sudden.’
‘So you are. Pour out for Mr. Taylor.’
He now perceived that she was sitting beside Jude, her
arm being round his waist. Jude, like the rest of the
company, bore on his face the signs of how deeply he had
been indulging.
‘Well, we’ve been waiting for certain legal hours to arrive,
to tell the truth,’ she continued bashfully, and making her
spirituous crimson look as much like a maiden blush as
possible. ‘Jude and I have decided to make up matters
between us by tying the knot again, as we find we can’t do
without one another after all. So, as a bright notion, we
agreed to sit on till it was late enough, and go and do it off-
hand.’
Jude seemed to pay no great heed to what she was
announcing, or indeed to anything whatever. The entrance
of Taylor infused fresh spirit into the company, and they
remained sitting, till Arabella whispered to her father: ‘Now
we may as well go.’
 ‘But the parson don’t know?’
‘Yes, I told him last night that we might come between
eight and nine, as there were reasons of decency for doing it
as early and quiet as possible; on account of it being our
second marriage, which might make people curious to look
on if they knew. He highly approved.’
‘O very well: I’m ready,’ said her father, getting up and
shaking himself.
‘Now, old darling,’ she said to Jude. ‘Come along, as you
promised.’
‘When did I promise anything?’ asked he, whom she had
made so tipsy by her special knowledge of that line of
business as almost to have made him sober again—or to
seem so to those who did not know him.
‘Why!’ said Arabella, affecting dismay. ‘You’ve promised
to marry me several times as we’ve sat here to-night. These
gentlemen have heard you.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ said Jude doggedly. “There’s only
one woman—but I won’t mention her in this Capharnaum!53
Arabella looked towards her father. ‘Now, Mr. Fawley, be
honourable,’ said Donn. ‘You and my daughter have been
living here together these three or four days, quite on the
understanding that you were going to marry her. Of course I
shouldn’t have had such goings on in my house if I hadn’t
understood that. As a point of honour you must do it now.’
‘Don’t say anything against my honour!’ enjoined Jude
hotly, standing up. ‘I’d marry the W—of Babylon54 rather
than do anything dishonourable! No reflection on you, my
dear. It is a mere rhetorical figure—what they call in the
books, hyperbole.’
‘Keep your figures for your debts to friends who shelter
you,’ said Donn.
‘If I am bound in honour to marry her—as I suppose I am
—though how I came to be here with her I know no more
than a dead man—marry her I will, so help me God! I have
never behaved dishonourably to a woman or to any living
thing. I am not a man who wants to save himself at the
expense of the weaker among us!’
‘There—never mind him, deary,’ said she, putting her
cheek against Jude’s. ‘Come up and wash your face, and just
put yourself tidy, and off we’ll go. Make it up with father.’
They shook hands. Jude went upstairs with her, and soon
came down looking tidy and calm. Arabella, too, had hastily
arranged herself, and accompanied by Donn away they
went.
‘Don’t go,’ she said to the guests at parting. ‘I’ve told the
little maid to get the breakfast while we are gone; and when
we come back we’ll all have some. A good strong cup of tea
will set everybody right for going home.’

When Arabella, Jude and Donn had disappeared on their

matrimonial errand the assembled guests yawned
themselves wider awake, and discussed the situation with
great interest. Tinker Taylor, being the most sober, reasoned
the most lucidly.
‘I don’t wish to speak against friends,’ he said. ‘But it do
seem a rare curiosity for a couple to marry over again! If
they couldn’t get on the first time when their minds were
limp,55 they won’t the second, by my reckoning.’
‘Do you think he’ll do it?’
‘He’s been put upon his honour by the woman, so he
med.’
‘He’d hardly do it straight off like this. He’s got no license
nor anything.’
‘She’s got that, bless you. Didn’t you hear her say so to
her father?’
‘Well,’ said Tinker Taylor, re-lighting his pipe at the gas-
jet. ‘Take her all together, limb by limb, she’s not such a
bad-looking piece—particular by candlelight. To be sure,
halfpence that have been in circulation can’t be expected to
look like new ones from the Mint. But for a woman that’s
been knocking about the four hemispheres for some time,
she’s passable enough. A little bit thick in the flitch56
perhaps: but I like a woman that a puff o’ wind won’t blow
down.’
Their eyes followed the movements of the little girl as she
spread the breakfast-cloth on the table they had been using,
without wiping up the slops of the liquor. The curtains were
undrawn, and the expression of the house made to look like
morning. Some of the guests, however, fell asleep in their
chairs. One or two went to the door, and gazed along the
street more than once. Tinker Taylor was the chief of these,
and after a time he came in with a leer on his face.
‘By Gad, they are coming! I think the deed’s done!’
‘No,’ said Uncle Joe, following him in. ‘Take my word, he
turned rusty57 at the last minute. They are walking in a very
onusual way; and that’s the meaning of it!’
They waited in silence till the wedding party could be
heard entering the house. First into the room came Arabella
boisterously; and her face was enough to show that her
strategy had succeeded.
‘Mrs. Fawley, I presume?’ said Tinker Taylor with mock
courtesy.
‘Certainly. Mrs. Fawley again,’ replied Arabella blandly,
pulling off her glove and holding out her left hand. ‘There’s
the padlock, see.… Well, he was a very nice, gentlemanly
man indeed. I mean the clergyman. He said to me as gentle
as a babe when all was done: “Mrs. Fawley, I congratulate
you heartily,” he says. “For having heard your history, and
that of your husband, I think you have both done the right
and proper thing. And for your past errors as a wife, and his
as a husband, I think you ought now to be forgiven by the
world, as you have forgiven each other,” says he. Yes: he
was a very nice, gentlemanly man. “The Church don’t
recognize divorce in her dogma, strictly speaking,” he says:
“and bear in mind the words of the Service in your goings
out and your comings in: What God hath joined together let
no man put asunder.” Yes: he was a very nice, gentlemanly
man.… But, Jude, my dear, you were enough to make a cat
laugh! You walked that straight, and held yourself that
steady, that one would have thought you were going
’prentice to a judge; though I knew you were seeing double
all the time, from the way you fumbled with my finger.’
‘I said I’d do anything to—save a woman’s honour,’
muttered Jude. ‘And I’ve done it!’
‘Well now, old deary, come along and have some
breakfast.’
‘I want—some—more whisky,’ said Jude stolidly.
‘Nonsense, dear. Not now! There’s no more left. The tea
will take the muddle out of our heads, and we shall be as
fresh as larks.’
‘All right. I’ve—married you. She said I ought to marry you
again, and I have straightway. It is true religion! Ha—ha—
ha!’

VI–8
Michaelmas58 came and passed, and Jude and his wife, who
had lived but a short time in her father’s house after their
re-marriage, were in lodgings on the top floor of a dwelling
nearer to the centre of the city.
He had done a few days’ work during the two or three
months since the event, but his health had been indifferent,
and it was now precarious. He was sitting in an arm-chair
before the fire, and coughed a good deal.
‘I’ve got a bargain for my trouble in marrying thee over
again!’ Arabella was saying to him. ‘I shall have to keep ’ee
entirely,—that’s what ’twill come to! I shall have to make
black-pot and sausages, and hawk ’em about the street, all
to support an invalid husband I’d no business to be saddled
with at all. Why didn’t you keep your health, deceiving one
like this? You were well enough when the wedding was!’
‘Ah, yes!’ said he, laughing acridly. ‘I have been thinking
of my foolish feeling about the pig you and I killed during
our first marriage. I feel now that the greatest mercy that
could be vouchsafed to me would be that something should
serve me as I served that animal.’
This was the sort of discourse that went on between them
every day now. The landlord of the lodging, who had heard
that they were a queer couple, had doubted if they were
married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude
one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was
about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing
her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and
ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the
note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be
respectable, said no more.
Jude did not get any better, and one day he requested
Arabella, with considerable hesitation, to execute a
commission for him. She asked him indifferently what it was.
‘To write to Sue.’
‘What in the name—do you want me to write to her for?’
‘To ask how she is, and if she’ll come to see me, because
I’m ill, and should like to see her—once again.’
‘It is like you to insult a lawful wife by asking such a
thing!’
‘It is just in order not to insult you that I ask you to do it.
You know I love Sue. I don’t wish to mince the matter—there
stands the fact: I love her. I could find a dozen ways of
sending a letter to her without your knowledge. But I wish to
be quite above-board with you, and with her husband. A
message through you asking her to come is at least free
from any odour of intrigue. If she retains any of her old
nature at all, she’ll come.’
‘You’ve no respect for marriage whatever, or its rights and
duties!’
‘What does it matter what my opinions are—a wretch like
me! Can it matter to anybody in the world who comes to see
me for half-an-hour—here with one foot in the grave! …
Come, please write, Arabella!’ he pleaded. ‘Repay my
candour by a little generosity!’
‘I should think not!’
‘Not just once?—O do!’He felt that his physical weakness
had taken away all his dignity.
‘What do you want her to know how you are for? She
don’t want to see ’ee. She’s the rat that forsook the sinking
ship!’
‘Don’t, don’t!’
‘And I stuck to un—the more fool I! Have that strumpet59
in the house indeed!’
Almost as soon as the words were spoken Jude sprang
from the chair, and before Arabella knew where she was he
had her on her back upon a little couch which stood there,
he kneeling above her.
‘Say another word of that sort,’ he whispered, ‘and I’ll kill
you—here and now! I’ve everything to gain by it—my own
death not being the least part. So don’t think there’s no
meaning in what I say!’
‘What do you want me to do?’ gasped Arabella.
‘Promise never to speak of her.’
‘Very well. I do.’
‘I take your word,’ he said scornfully as he loosened her.
‘But what it is worth I can’t say.’
‘You couldn’t kill the pig, but you could kill me!’
‘Ah—there you have me! No—I couldn’t kill you—even in
a passion. Taunt away!’
He then began coughing very much, and she estimated
his life with an appraiser’s eye as he sank back ghastly pale.
‘I’ll send for her,’ Arabella murmured, ‘if you’ll agree to my
being in the room with you all the time she’s here.’
The softer side of his nature, the desire to see Sue, made
him unable to resist the offer even now, provoked as he had
been; and he replied breathlessly: ‘Yes, I agree. Only send
for her!’
In the evening he inquired if she had written.
 ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I wrote a note telling her you were ill, and
asking her to come to-morrow or the day after. I haven’t
posted it yet.’
The next day Jude wondered if she really did post it, but
would not ask her; and foolish Hope, that lives on a drop
and a crumby made him restless with expectation. He knew
the times of the possible trains, and listened on each
occasion for sounds of her.
She did not come; but Jude would not address Arabella
again thereon. He hoped and expected all the next day; but
no Sue appeared; neither was there any note of reply. Then
Jude decided in the privacy of his mind that Arabella had
never posted hers, although she had written it. There was
something in her manner which told it. His physical
weakness was such that he shed tears at the
disappointment when she was not there to see. His
suspicions were, in fact, well founded. Arabella, like some
other nurses, thought that your duty towards your invalid
was to pacify him by any means short of really acting upon
his fancies.
He never said another word to her about his wish or his
conjecture. A silent, undiscerned resolve grew up in him,
which gave him, if not strength, stability and calm. One
midday when, after an absence of two hours, she came into
the room, she beheld the chair empty.
Down she flopped on the bed, and sitting, meditated.
‘Now where the devil is my man gone to!’ she said.
A driving rain from the north-east had been falling with
more or less intermission all the morning, and looking from
the window at the dripping spouts it seemed impossible to
believe that any sick man would have ventured out to
almost certain death. Yet a conviction possessed Arabella
that he had gone out, and it became a certainty when she
had searched the house. ‘If he’s such a fool, let him be!’ she
said. ‘I can do no more.’
 Jude was at that moment in a railway train that was
drawing near to Alfredston, oddly swathed, pale as a
monumental figure in alabaster,60 and much stared at by
other passengers. An hour later his thin form, in the long
great-coat and blanket he had come with, but without an
umbrella, could have been seen walking along the five-mile
road to Marygreen. On his face showed the determined
purpose that alone sustained him, but to which his
weakness afforded a sorry foundation. By the uphill walk he
was quite blown, but he pressed on; and at half-past three
o’clock stood by the familiar well at Marygreen. The rain was
keeping everybody indoors; Jude crossed the green to the
church without observation, and found the building open.
Here he stood, looking forth at the school, whence he could
hear the usual sing-song tones of the little voices that had
not learnt Creation’s groan.
He waited till a small boy came from the school—one
evidently allowed out before hours for some reason or other.
Jude held up his hand, and the child came.
‘Please call at the schoolhouse and ask Mrs. Phillotson if
she will be kind enough to come to the church for a few
minutes.’
The child departed, and Jude heard him knock at the door
of the dwelling. He himself went further into the church.
Everything was new, except a few pieces of carving
preserved from the wrecked old fabric, now fixed against the
new walls. He stood by these: they seemed akin to the
perished people of that place who were his ancestors and
Sue’s.
A light footstep, which might have been accounted no
more than an added drip to the rainfall, sounded in the
porch, and he looked round.
‘O—I didn’t think it was you! I didn’t—O Jude!’ A hysterical
catch in her breath ended in a succession of them. He
advanced, but she quickly recovered and went back.
 ‘Don’t go—don’t go!’ he implored. ‘This is my last time! I
thought it would be less intrusive than to enter your house.
And I shall never come again. Don’t then be unmerciful.
Sue, Sue! we are acting by the letter; and “the letter
killeth”!’
‘I’ll stay—I won’t be unkind!’ she said, her mouth
quivering and her tears flowing as she allowed him to come
closer. ‘But why did you come, and do this wrong thing, after
doing such a right thing as you have done?’
‘What right thing?’
‘Marrying Arabella again. It was in the Alfredston paper.
She has never been other than yours, Jude—in a proper
sense. And therefore you did so well—O so well!—in
recognizing it—and taking her to you again.’
‘God above—and is that all I’ve come to hear? If there is
any thing more degrading, immoral, unnatural, than another
in my life, it is this meretricious contract with Arabella which
has been called doing the right thing! And you too—you call
yourself Phillotson’s wife! His wife! You are mine.’
‘Don’t make me rush away from you—I can’t bear much!
But on this point I am decided.’
‘I cannot understand how you did it—how you think it—I
cannot!’
‘Never mind that. He is a kind husband to me—And I—I’ve
wrestled and struggled, and fasted, and prayed. I have
nearly brought my body into complete subjection. And you
mustn’t—will you—wake—’
‘O you darling little fool; where is your reason? You seem
to have suffered the loss of your faculties! I would argue
with you if I didn’t know that a woman in your state of
feeling is quite beyond all appeals to her brains. Or is it that
you are humbugging yourself, as so many women do about
these things; and don’t actually believe what you pretend
to, and only are indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised
by an affected belief?’
‘Luxury! How can you be so cruel!’
 ‘You dear, sad, soft, most melancholy wreck of a
promising human intellect that it has ever been my lot to
behold! Where is your scorn of convention gone? I would
have died game!’
‘You crush, almost insult me, Jude! Go away from me!’
She turned off quickly.
‘I will. I would never come to see you again, even if I had
the strength to come, which I shall not have any more. Sue,
Sue, you are not worth a man’s love!’
Her bosom, began to go up and down. ‘I can’t endure you
to say that!’ she burst out, and her eye resting on him a
moment, she turned back impulsively. ‘Don’t, don’t scorn
me! Kiss me, O kiss me lots of times, and say I am not a
coward and a contemptible humbug—I can’t bear it!’ She
rushed up to him and, with her mouth on his, continued: ‘I
must tell you—O I must—my darling Love! It has been—only
a church marriage—an apparent marriage I mean! He
suggested it at the very first!’
‘How?’
‘I mean it is a nominal marriage only. It hasn’t been more
than that at all since I came back to him!’
‘Sue!’ he said. Pressing her to him in his arms he bruised
her lips with kisses: ‘If misery can know happiness, I have a
moment’s happiness now! Now, in the name of all you hold
holy, tell me the truth, and no lie. You do love me still?’
‘I do! You know it too well! … But I mustn’t do this!—I
mustn’t kiss you back as I would!’
‘But do!’
‘And yet you are so dear!—and you look so ill—’
‘And so do you! There’s one more, in memory of our dead
little children—yours and mine!’
The words struck her like a blow, and she bent her head.
‘I mustn’t—I can’t go on with this!’ she gasped presently.
‘But there, there, darling; I give you back your kisses; I do, I
do! … And now I’ll hate myself for ever for my sin!’
 ‘No—let me make my last appeal. Listen to this! We’ve
both remarried out of our senses. I was made drunk to do it.
You were the same. I was gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk.
Either form of intoxication takes away the nobler vision.…
Let us then shake off our mistakes, and run away together!’
‘No; again no! … Why do you tempt me so far, Jude! It is
too merciless! … But I’ve got over myself now. Don’t follow
me—don’t look at me. Leave me, for pity’s sake!’
She ran up the church to the east end, and Jude did as
she requested. He did not turn his head, but took up his
blanket, which she had not seen, and went straight out. As
he passed the end of the church she heard his coughs
mingling with the rain on the windows, and in a last instinct
of human affection, even now unsubdued by her fetters, she
sprang up as if to go and succour him. But she knelt down
again, and stopped her ears with her hands till all possible
sound of him had passed away.
He was by this time at the corner of the green, from which
the path ran across the fields in which he had scared rooks
as a boy. He turned and looked back, once, at the building
which still contained Sue; and then went on, knowing that
his eyes would light on that scene no more.
There are cold spots up and down Wessex in autumn and
winter weather; but the coldest of all when a north or east
wind is blowing is the crest of the down by the Brown House,
where the road to Alfredston crosses the old Ridgeway. Here
the first winter sleets and snows fall and lie, and here the
spring frost lingers last unthawed. Here in the teeth of the
north-east wind and rain Jude now pursued his way, wet
through, the necessary slowness of his walk from lack of his
former strength being insufficient to maintain his heat. He
came to the milestone, and, raining as it was, spread his
blanket and lay down there to rest. Before moving on he
went and felt at the back of the stone for his own carving. It
was still there; but nearly obliterated by moss. He passed
the spot where the gibbet of his ancestor and Sue’s had
stood, and descended the hill.
It was dark when he reached Alfredston, where he had a
cup of tea, the deadly chill that began to creep into his
bones being too much for him to endure fasting. To get
home he had to travel by a steam tram-car, and two
branches of railway, with much waiting at a junction. He did
not reach Christminster till ten o’clock.

VI–9
On the platform stood Arabella. She looked him up and
down.
‘You’ve been to see her?’ she asked.
‘I have,’ said Jude, literally tottering with cold and
lassitude.
‘Well, now you’d best march along home.’
The water ran out of him as he went, and he was
compelled to lean against the wall to support himself while
coughing.
‘You’ve done for yourself by this, young man,’ said she. ‘I
don’t know whether you know it.’
‘Of course I do. I meant to do for myself.’
‘What—to commit suicide?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Well, I’m blest! Kill yourself for a woman.’
‘Listen to me, Arabella. You think you are the stronger;
and so you are, in a physical sense, now. You could push me
over like a ninepin. You did not send that letter the other
day, and I could not resent your conduct. But I am not so
weak in another way as you think. I made up my mind that a
man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a
fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a
particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish
those two wishes at one stroke by taking this journey in the
rain. That I’ve done. I have seen her for the last time, and
I’ve finished myself—put an end to a feverish life which
ought never to have been begun!’
‘Lord—you do talk lofty! Won’t you have something warm
to drink?’
‘No thank you. Let’s get home.’
They went along by the silent colleges, and Jude kept
stopping.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Stupid fancies. I see, in a way, those spirits of the dead
again, on this my last walk, that I saw when I first walked
here!’
‘What a curious chap you are!’
‘I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But I
don’t revere all of them as I did then. I don’t believe in half
of them. The theologians, the apologists, and their kin the
metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen, and others, no
longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for me by the
grind of stern reality!’
The expression of Jude’s corpse-like face in the watery
lamplight was indeed as if he saw people where there was
nobody. At moments he stood still by an archway, like one
watching a figure walk out; then he would look at a window
like one discerning a familiar face behind it. He seemed to
hear voices, whose words he repeated as if to gather their
meaning.
‘They seem laughing at me!’
‘Who?’
‘O—I was talking to myself! The phantoms all about here,
in the college archways, and windows. They used to look
friendly in the old days, particularly Addison, and Gibbon,
and Johnson, and Dr. Browne,61 and Bishop Ken—’
‘Come along do! Phantoms! There’s neither living nor
dead hereabouts except a damn policeman! I never saw the
streets emptier.’
‘Fancy! The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the
great Dissector of Melancholy there!’62
 ‘I don’t want to hear about ’em! They bore me.’
‘Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that lane—
Wycliffe—Harvey—Hooker63—Arnold—and a whole crowd of
Tractarian Shades____’
I don’t want to know their names, I tell you! What do I
care about folk dead and gone? Upon my soul you are more
sober when you’ve been drinking than when you have not!’
‘I must rest a moment,’ he said; and as he paused,
holding to the railings, he measured with his eye the height
of a college front. ‘This is old Rubric. And that Sarcophagus;
and up that lane Crozier and Tudor: and all down there is
Cardinal with its long front, and its windows with lifted
eyebrows, representing the polite surprise of the University
at the efforts of such as I.’
‘Come along, and I’ll treat you!’
‘Very well. It will help me home, for I feel the chilly fog
from the meadows of Cardinal as if death-claws were
grabbing me through and through. As Antigone said, I am
neither a dweller among men nor ghosts.64 But, Arabella,
when I am dead, you’ll see my spirit flitting up and down
here among these!’
‘Pooh! You mayn’t die after all. You are tough enough yet,
old man.’

It was night at Marygreen, and the rain of the afternoon

showed no sign of abatement. About the time at which Jude
and Arabella were walking the streets of Christminster
homeward, the Widow Edlin crossed the green, and opened
the back door of the schoolmaster’s dwelling, which she
often did now before bedtime, to assist Sue in putting things
away.
Sue was muddling helplessly in the kitchen, for she was
not a good housewife, though she tried to be, and grew
impatient of domestic details.
 ‘Lord love ’ee, what do ye do that yourself for, when I’ve
come o’ purpose! You knew I should come.’
‘O—I don’t know—I forgot! No, I didn’t forget. I did it to
discipline myself. I have scrubbed the stairs since eight
o’clock. I must practise myself in my household duties. I’ve
shamefully neglected them!’
‘Why should ye? He’ll get a better school, perhaps be a
parson, in time, and you’ll keep two servants. ’Tis a pity to
spoil them pretty hands.’
‘Don’t talk of my pretty hands, Mrs. Edlin. This pretty
body of mine has been the ruin of me already!’
‘Pshoo—you’ve got no body to speak of! You put me more
in mind of a sperrit. But there seems something wrong to-
night, my dear. Husband cross?
‘No. He never is. He’s gone to bed early.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I cannot tell you. I have done wrong to-day. And I want to
eradicate it.… Well—I will tell you this—Jude has been here
this afternoon, and I find I still love him—O, grossly! I cannot
tell you more.’
‘Ah! said the widow. ‘I told ’ee how ’twould be!’
‘But it shan’t be! I have not told my husband of his visit; it
is not necessary to trouble him about it, as I never mean to
see Jude any more. But I am going to make my conscience
right on my duty to Richard—by doing a penance—the
ultimate thing. I must!’
‘I wouldn’t—since he agrees to it being otherwise, and it
has gone on three months very well as it is.’
‘Yes—he agrees to my living as I choose; but I feel it is an
indulgence I ought not to exact from him. It ought not to
have been accepted by me. To reverse it will be terrible—but
I must be more just to him. O why was I so unheroic!’
‘What is it you don’t like in him? asked Mrs. Edlin
curiously.
‘I cannot tell you. It is something … I cannot say. The
mournful thing is, that nobody would admit it as a reason for
feeling as I do; so that no excuse is left me.’
‘Did you ever tell Jude what it was?’
‘Never.’
‘I’ve heard strange tales o’ husbands in my time,’
observed the widow in a lowered voice. ‘They say that when
the saints were upon the earth devils used to take
husbands’ forms o’ nights, and get poor women into all sorts
of trouble. But I don’t know why that should come into my
head, for it is only a tale.… What a wind and rain it is to-
night! Well—don’t be in a hurry to alter things, my dear.
Think it over.
‘No, no! I’ve screwed my weak soul up to treating him
more courteously—and it must be now—at once—before I
break down!’
‘I don’t think you ought to force your nature. No woman
ought to be expected to.’
‘It is my duty. I will drink my cup to the dregs!’
Half-an-hour later when Mrs. Edlin put on her bonnet and
shawl to leave, Sue seemed to be seized with vague terror.
‘No, no—don’t go, Mrs. Edlin,’ she implored, her eyes
enlarged, and with a quick nervous look over her shoulder.
‘But it is bed-time, child.’
‘Yes, but—there’s the little spare room—my room that
was. It is quite ready. Please stay, Mrs. Edlin!—I shall want
you in the morning.’
‘O well—I don’t mind, if you wish. Nothing will happen to
my four old walls, whether I be there or no.’
She then fastened up the doors, and they ascended the
stairs together.
‘Wait here, Mrs. Edlin,’ said Sue. ‘I’ll go into my old room a
moment by myself.’
Leaving the widow on the landing Sue turned to the
chamber which had been hers exclusively since her arrival
at Marygreen, and pushing to the door knelt down by the
bed for a minute or two. She then arose, and taking her
nightgown from the pillow undressed and came out to Mrs.
Edlin. A man could be heard snoring in the room opposite.
She wished Mrs. Edlin good-night, and the widow entered
the room that Sue had just vacated.
Sue unlatched the other chamber door, and, as if seized
with faintness, sank down outside it. Getting up again she
half opened the door, and said ‘Richard.’ As the word came
out of her mouth she visibly shuddered.
The snoring had quite ceased for some time, but he did
not reply. Sue seemed relieved, and hurried back to Mrs
Edlin’s chamber. ‘Are you in bed, Mrs. Edlin?’ she asked.
‘No, dear,’ said the widow, opening the door. ‘I be old and
slow, and it takes me a long while to un-ray.65 I hadn’t
unlaced my jumps66 yet.’
‘I—don’t hear him! And perhaps—perhaps—’
‘What, child?’
‘Perhaps he’s dead!’ she gasped. ‘And then—I should be
free, and I could go to Jude! … Ah—no—I forgot her—and
God!’
‘Let’s go and hearken. No—he’s snoring again. But the
rain and the wind is so loud that you can hardly hear
anything but between whiles.’
Sue had dragged herself back. ‘Mrs. Edlin, good night
again! I am sorry I called you out.’ The widow retreated a
second time.
The strained, resigned look returned to Sue’s face when
she was alone. ‘I must do it—I must! I must drink to the
dregs!’ she whispered. ‘Richard!’ she said again.
‘Hey—what? Is that you, Susanna?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want? Anything the matter? Wait a
moment.’ He pulled on some articles of clothing, and came
to the door. ‘Yes?’
‘When we were at Shaston I jumped out of the window
rather than that you should come near me. I have never
reversed that treatment till now—when I have come to beg
your pardon for it, and ask you to let me in.’
 ‘Perhaps you only think you ought to do this? I don’t wish
you to come against your impulses, as I have said.’
‘But I beg to be admitted.’ She waited a moment, and
repeated, ‘I beg to be admitted! I have been in error—even
to-day. I have exceeded my rights. I did not mean to tell
you, but perhaps I ought. I sinned against you this
afternoon.’
‘How?’
‘I met Jude! I didn’t know he was coming. And—’
‘Well?’
‘I kissed him, and let him kiss me.’
‘O—the old story!’
‘Richard, I didn’t know we were going to kiss each other
till we did!’
‘How many times?’
‘A good many. I don’t know. I am horrified to look back on
it, and the least I can do after it is to come to you like this.’
‘Come—this is pretty bad, after what I’ve done! Anything
else to confess?’
‘No.’ She had been intending to say: ‘I called him my
darling Love.’ But, as a contrite woman always keeps back a
little, that portion of the scene remained untold. She went
on: ‘I am never going to see him any more. He spoke of
some things of the past: and it overcame me. He spoke of—
the children.—But, as I have said, I am glad—almost glad I
mean—that they are dead, Richard. It blots out all that life
of mine!’
‘Well—about not seeing him again any more. Come—you
really mean this?’ There was something in Phillotson’s tone
now which seemed to show that his three months of re-
marriage with Sue had somehow not been so satisfactory as
his magnanimity or amative patience had anticipated.
‘Yes, yes!’
‘Perhaps you’ll swear it on the New Testament?’
‘I will.’
 He went back to the room and brought out a little brown
Testament. ‘Now then: So help you God!’
She swore.
‘Very good!’
‘Now I supplicate you, Richard, to whom I belong, and
whom I wish to honour and obey, as I vowed, to let me in.’
‘Think it over well. You know what it means. Having you
back in the house was one thing—this another. So think
again.’
‘I have thought—I wish this!’
‘That’s a complaisant spirit—and perhaps you are right.
With a lover hanging about, a half-marriage should be
completed. But I repeat my reminder this third and last
time.’
‘It is my wish! … O God!’
‘What did you say O God for?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Yes you do! But …’ He gloomily considered her thin and
fragile form a moment longer as she crouched before him in
her nightclothes. ‘Well, I thought it might end like this,’ he
said presently. ‘I owe you nothing, after these signs; but I’ll
take you in at your word, and forgive you.’
He put his arm round her to lift her up. Sue started back.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, speaking for the first time
sternly. ‘You shrink from me again?—just as formerly!’
‘No, Richard—I—I—was not thinking—’
‘You wish to come in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You still bear in mind what it means?’
‘Yes. It is my duty!’
Placing the candlestick on the chest of drawers he led her
through the doorway, and lifting her bodily, kissed her. A
quick look of aversion passed over her face, but clenching
her teeth she uttered no cry.
Mrs. Edlin had by this time undressed, and was about to
get into bed when she said to herself: ‘Ah—perhaps I’d
better go and see if the little thing is all right. How it do blow
and rain!’
The widow went out on the landing, and saw that Sue had
disappeared. ‘Ah! Poor soul! Weddings be funerals ‘a b’lieve
nowadays. Fifty-five years ago, come Fall, since my man and
I married! Times have changed since then!’

VI–10
Despite himself Jude recovered somewhat, and worked at
his trade for several weeks. After Christmas, however, he
broke down again.
With the money he had earned he shifted his lodgings to
a yet more central part of the town. But Arabella saw that
he was not likely to do much work for a long while, and was
cross enough at the turn affairs had taken since her re-
marriage to him. ‘I’m hanged if you haven’t been clever in
this last stroke!’ she would say, ‘to get a nurse for nothing
by marrying me!’
Jude was absolutely indifferent to what she said, and,
indeed, often regarded her abuse in a humorous light.
Sometimes his mood was more earnest, and as he lay he
often rambled on upon the defeat of his early aims.
‘Every man has some little power in some one direction,’
he would say. ‘I was never really stout enough for the stone
trade, particularly the fixing. Moving the blocks always used
to strain me, and standing the trying draughts in buildings
before the windows are in, always gave me colds, and I
think that began the mischief inside. But I felt I could do one
thing if I had the opportunity. I could accumulate ideas, and
impart them to others. I wonder if the Founders had such as
I in their minds—a fellow good for nothing else but that
particular thing? … I hear that soon there is going to be a
better chance for such helpless students as I was. There are
schemes afoot for making the University less exclusive, and
extending its influence. I don’t know much about it. And it is
too late, too late for me! Ah—and for how many worthier
ones before me!’
‘How you keep a-mumbling!’ said Arabella. ‘I should have
thought you’d have got over all that craze about books by
this time. And so you would, if you’d had any sense to begin
with. You are as bad now as when we were first married.’
On one occasion while soliloquizing thus he called her
‘Sue’ unconsciously.
‘I wish you’d mind who you are talking to!’ said Arabella
indignantly. ‘Calling a respectable married woman by the
name of that—’ She remembered herself and he did not
catch the word.
But in the course of time, when she saw how things were
going, and how very little she had to fear from Sue’s rivalry,
she had a fit of generosity. ‘I suppose you want to see your
—Sue?’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t mind her coming. You can
have her here if you like.
‘I don’t wish to see her again.’
‘O—that’s a change!’
‘And don’t tell her anything about me—that I’m ill, or
anything. She has chosen her course. Let her go!’
One day he received a surprise. Mrs. Edlin came to see
him, quite on her own account. Jude’s wife, whose feelings
as to where his affections were centred had reached
absolute indifference by this time, went out, leaving the old
woman alone with Jude. He impulsively asked how Sue was,
and then said bluntly, remembering what Sue had told him:
‘I suppose they are still only husband and wife in name?’
Mrs. Edlin hesitated. ‘Well, no—it’s different now. She’s
begun it quite lately—all of her own free will.’
‘When did she begin?’ he asked quickly.
‘The night after you came. But as a punishment to her
poor self. He didn’t wish it, but she insisted.’
‘Sue, my Sue—you darling fool—this is almost more than I
can endure! … Mrs. Edlin—don’t be frightened at my
rambling—I’ve got to talk to myself lying here so many
hours alone—she was once a woman whose intellect was to
mine like a star to a benzoline67 lamp: who saw all my
superstitions as cobwebs that she could brush away with a
word. Then bitter affliction came to us, and her intellect
broke, and she veered round to darkness. Strange difference
of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views
of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably.
And now the ultimate horror has come—her giving herself
like this to what she loathes, in her enslavement to forms!—
she, so sensitive, so shrinking, that the very wind seemed to
blow on her with a touch of deference …68 As for Sue and
me when we were at our own best, long ago—when our
minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless—the time
was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be
any good to us. And so the resistance they met with brought
reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me! … There—
this, Mrs. Edlin, is how I go on to myself continually, as I lie
here. I must be boring you awfully.’
‘Not at all, my dear boy. I could hearken to ’ee all day.’
As Jude reflected more and more on her news, and grew
more restless, he began in his mental agony to use terribly
profane language about social conventions, which started a
fit of coughing. Presently there came a knock at the door
downstairs. As nobody answered it Mrs. Edlin herself went
down.
The visitor said blandly: ‘The doctor.’ The lanky form was
that of Physician Vilbert, who had been called in by Arabella.
‘How is my patient at present?’ asked the physician.
‘O bad—very bad! Poor chap, he got excited, and do
blaspeam terribly, since I let out some gossip by accident—
the more to my blame. But there—you must excuse a man
in suffering for what he says, and I hope God will forgive
him.’
‘Ah. I’ll go up and see him. Mrs. Fawley at home?’
‘She’s not in at present, but she’ll be here soon.’
 Vilbert went; but though Jude had hitherto taken the
medicines of that skilful practitioner with the greatest
indifference whenever poured down his throat by Arabella,
he was now so brought to bay by events that he vented his
opinion of Vilbert in the physician’s face, and so forcibly,
and with such striking epithets, that Vilbert soon scurried
downstairs again. At the door he met Arabella, Mrs. Edlin
having left. Arabella inquired how he thought her husband
was now, and seeing that the doctor looked ruffled, asked
him to take something. He assented.
‘I’ll bring it to you here in the passage,’ she said. ‘There’s
nobody but me about the house to-day.’
She brought him a bottle and a glass, and he drank.
Arabella began shaking with suppressed laughter. ‘What is
this, my dear?’ he asked, smacking his lips.
‘O—a drop of wine—and something in it.’ Laughing again
she said: ‘I poured your own love-philter into it, that you
sold me at the Agricultural Show, don’t you remember?’
‘I do, I do! Clever woman! But you must be prepared for
the consequences.’ Putting his arm round her shoulders he
kissed her there and then.
‘Don’t, don’t,’ she whispered, laughing good-humouredly.
‘My man will hear.’
She let him out of the house, and as she went back she
said to herself: ‘Well! Weak women must provide for a rainy
day. And if my poor fellow upstairs do go off—as I suppose
he will soon—it’s well to keep chances open. And I can’t pick
and choose now as I could when I was younger. And one
must take the old if one can’t get the young.’

VI–11
The last pages to which the chronicler of these lives would
ask the reader’s attention are concerned with the scene in
and out of Jude’s bedroom when leafy summer came round
again.
 His face was now so thin that his old friends would hardly
have known him. It was afternoon, and Arabella was at the
looking-glass curling her hair, which operation she
performed by heating an umbrella-stay69 in the flame of a
candle she had lighted, and using it upon the flowing lock.
When she had finished this, practised a dimple, and put on
her things, she cast her eyes round upon Jude. He seemed
to be sleeping, though his position was an elevated one, his
malady preventing him lying down.
Arabella, hatted, gloved, and ready, sat down and waited,
as if expecting some one to come and take her place as
nurse.
Certain sounds from without revealed that the town was
in festivity,70 though little of the festival, whatever it might
have been, could be seen here. Bells began to ring, and the
notes came into the room through the open window, and
travelled round Jude’s head in a hum. They made her
restless, and at last she said to herself: ‘Why ever doesn’t
father come!’
She looked again at Jude, critically gauged his ebbing life,
as she had done so many times during the late months, and
glancing at his watch, which was hung up by way of
timepiece, rose impatiently. Still he slept, and coming to a
resolution she slipped from the room, closed the door
noiselessly, and descended the stairs. The house was
empty. The attraction which moved Arabella to go abroad
had evidently drawn away the other inmates long before.
It was a warm, cloudless, enticing day. She shut the front
door, and hastened round into Chief Street, and when near
the Theatre could hear the notes of the organ, a rehearsal
for a coming concert being in progress. She entered under
the archway of Oldgate College, where men were putting up
awnings round the quadrangle for a ball in the Hall that
evening. People who had come up from the country for the
day were picnicking on the grass, and Arabella walked along
the gravel paths and under the aged limes. But finding this
place rather dull she returned to the streets, and watched
the carriages drawing up for the concert, numerous Dons
and their wives, and undergraduates with gay female
companions, crowding up likewise. When the doors were
closed, and the concert began, she moved on.
The powerful notes of that concert rolled forth through
the swinging yellow blinds of the open windows, over the
house-tops, and into the still air of the lanes. They reached
so far as to the room in which Jude lay; and it was about this
time that his cough began again and awakened him.
As soon as he could speak he murmured, his eyes still
closed: ‘A little water, please.’
Nothing but the deserted room received his appeal, and
he coughed to exhaustion again—saying still more feebly:
‘Water—some water—Sue—Arabella!’
The room remained still as before. Presently he gasped
again: ‘Throat—water—Sue—darling—drop of water—please
—O please!’
No water came, and the organ notes, faint as a bee’s
hum, rolled in as before.
While he remained, his face changing, shouts and hurrahs
came from somewhere in the direction of the river.
‘Ah—yes! The Remembrance games,’ he murmured. ‘And
I here. And Sue defiled!’
The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ
notes. Jude’s face changed more: he whispered slowly, his
parched lips scarcely moving:
‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in
which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’
(‘Hurrah!’)
‘Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from
above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night
be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.’
(‘Hurrah!)
‘Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the
ghost when I came out of the belly? … For now should I
have lain still and been quiet. I should have slept: then had I
been at rest!’
(‘Hurrah!’)
‘There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice
of the oppressor.… The small and the great are there; and
the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given
to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?’71

Meanwhile Arabella, in her journey to discover what was

going on, took a short cut down a narrow street and through
an obscure nook into the quad of Cardinal. It was full of
bustle, and brilliant in the sunlight with flowers and other
preparations for a ball here also. A carpenter nodded to her,
one who had formerly been a fellow-workman of Jude’s. A
corridor was in course of erection from the entrance to the
Hall staircase, of gay red and buff bunting. Waggon-loads of
boxes containing bright plants in full bloom were being
placed about, and the great staircase was covered with red
cloth. She nodded to one workman and another, and
ascended to the Hall on the strength of their acquaintance,
where they were putting down a new floor and decorating
for the dance. The cathedral bell close at hand was
sounding for five o’clock service.
‘I should not mind having a spin there with a fellow’s arm
round my waist,’ she said to one of the men. ‘But Lord, I
must be getting home again—there’s a lot to do. No dancing
for me!’
When she reached home she was met at the door by
Stagg, and one or two other of Jude’s fellow stone-workers.
‘We are just going down to the river,’ said the former, ‘to
see the boat-bumping.72 But we’ve called round on our way
to ask how your husband is.’
‘He’s sleeping nicely, thank you,’ said Arabella.
‘That’s right. Well now, can’t you give yourself half-an-
hour’s relaxation, Mrs. Fawley, and come along with us?
’Twould do you good.’
 ‘I should like to go,’ said she. ‘I’ve never seen the boat-
racing, and I hear it is good fun.’
‘Come along!’
‘How I wish I could!’ She looked longingly down the street.
‘Wait a minute, then. I’ll just run up and see how he is now.
Father is with him, I believe; so I can most likely come.’
They waited, and she entered. Downstairs the inmates
were absent as before, having, in fact, gone in a body to the
river where the procession of boats was to pass. When she
reached the bedroom she found that her father had not
even now come.
‘Why couldn’t he have been here!’ she said impatiently.
‘He wants to see the boats himself—that’s what it is!’
However, on looking round to the bed she brightened, for
she saw that Jude was apparently sleeping, though he was
not in the usual half-elevated posture necessitated by his
cough. He had slipped down, and lay flat. A second glance
caused her to start, and she went to the bed. His face was
quite white, and gradually becoming rigid. She touched his
fingers; they were cold, though his body was still warm. She
listened at his chest. All was still within. The bumping of
near thirty years had ceased.
After her first appalled sense of what had happened the
faint notes of a military or other brass band from the river
reached her ears; and in a provoked tone she exclaimed, ‘To
think he should die just now! Why did he die just now!’ Then
meditating another moment or two she went to the door,
softly closed it as before, and again descended the stairs.
‘Here she is!’ said one of the workmen. ‘We wondered if
you were coming after all. Come along; we must be quick to
get a good place.… Well, how is he? Sleeping well still? Of
course, we don’t want to drag ’ee away if—’
‘O yes—sleeping quite sound. He won’t wake yet,’ she
said hurriedly.
They went with the crowd down Cardinal Street, where
they presently reached the bridge, and the gay barges burst
upon their view. Thence they passed by a narrow slit down
to the riverside path—now dusty, hot, and thronged. Almost
as soon as they had arrived the grand procession of boats
began; the oars smacking with a loud kiss on the face of the
stream, as they were lowered from the perpendicular.
‘O, I say—how jolly! I’m glad I’ve come,’ said Arabella.
‘And—it can’t hurt my husband—my being away.’
On the opposite side of the river, on the crowded barges,
were gorgeous nosegays of feminine beauty, fashionably
arrayed in green, pink, blue, and white. The blue flag of the
Boat Club denoted the centre of interest, beneath which a
band in red uniform gave out the notes she had already
heard in the death-chamber. Collegians of all sorts, in
canoes with ladies, watching keenly for ‘our’ boat, darted up
and down. While she regarded the lovely scene somebody
touched Arabella in the ribs, and looking round she saw
Vilbert.
‘That philter is operating, you know!’ he said with a leer.
‘Shame on ’ee to wreck a heart so!’
‘I shan’t talk of love to-day.’
‘Why not? It is a general holiday.’
She did not reply. Vilbert’s arm stole round her waist,
which act could be performed unobserved in the crowd. An
arch expression overspread Arabella’s face at the feel of the
arm, but she kept her eyes on the river as if she did not
know of the embrace.
The crowd surged, pushing Arabella and her friends
sometimes nearly into the river, and she would have
laughed heartily at the horseplay that succeeded, if the
imprint on her mind’s eye of a pale, statuesque
countenance she had lately gazed upon had not sobered her
a little.
The fun on the water reached the acme of excitement;
there were immersions, there were shouts: the race was lost
and won, the pink and blue and yellow ladies retired from
the barges, and the people who had watched began to
move.
‘Well—it’s been awfully good,’ cried Arabella. ‘But I think I
must get back to my poor man. Father is there, so far as I
know; but I had better get back.’
‘What’s your hurry?’
‘Well, I must go.… Dear, dear, this is awkward!’
At the narrow gangway where the people ascended from
the riverside path to the bridge the crowd was literally
jammed into one hot mass—Arabella and Vilbert with the
rest; and here they remained motionless, Arabella
exclaiming, ‘Dear, dear!’ more and more impatiently; for it
had just occurred to her mind that if Jude were discovered to
have died alone an inquest might be deemed necessary.
‘What a fidget you are, my love,’ said the physician, who,
being pressed close against her by the throng, had no need
of personal effort for contact. ‘Just as well have patience:
there’s no getting away yet!’
It was nearly ten minutes before the wedged multitude
moved sufficiently to let them pass through. As soon as she
got up into the street Arabella hastened on, forbidding the
physician to accompany her further that day. She did not go
straight to her house; but to the abode of a woman who
performed the last necessary offices for the poorer dead;
where she knocked.
‘My husband has just gone, poor soul,’ she said. ‘Can you
come and lay him out?’
Arabella waited a few minutes; and the two women went
along, elbowing their way through the stream of fashionable
people pouring out of Cardinal meadow, and being nearly
knocked down by the carriages.
‘I must call at the sexton’s about the bell, too,’ said
Arabella. ‘It is just round here, isn’t it? I’ll meet you at my
door.’
By ten o’clock that night Jude was lying on the bedstead
at his lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an
arrow. Through the partly opened window the joyous throb
of a waltz entered from the ball-room at Cardinal.

Two days later, when the sky was equally cloudless, and the
air equally still, two persons stood beside Jude’s open coffin
in the same little bedroom. On one side was Arabella, on the
other the Widow Edlin. They were both looking at Jude’s
face, the worn old eyelids of Mrs. Edlin being red.
‘How beautiful he is!’ said she.
‘Yes. He’s a ’andsome corpse,’ said Arabella.
The window was still open to ventilate the room, and it
being about noontide the clear air was motionless and quiet
without. From a distance came voices; and an apparent
noise of persons stamping.
‘What’s that?’ murmured the old woman.
‘Oh, that’s the doctors in the Theatre, conferring Honorary
degrees on the Duke of Hamptonshire and a lot more
illustrious gents of that sort. It’s Remembrance Week, you
know. The cheers come from the young men.’
‘Ay; young and strong-lunged! Not like our poor boy here.’
An occasional word, as from some one making a speech,
floated from the open windows of the Theatre across to this
quiet corner, at which there seemed to be a smile of some
sort upon the marble features of Jude; while the old,
superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and Horace, and the
dog-eared Greek Testament on the neighbouring shelf, and
the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted
with, roughened with stone-dust where he had been in the
habit of catching them up for a few minutes between his
labours, seemed to pale to a sickly cast at the sounds. The
bells struck out joyously; and their reverberations travelled
around the bedroom.
Arabella’s eyes removed from Jude to Mrs. Edlin. ‘D’ye
think she will come?’ she asked.
‘I could not say. She swore not to see him again.’
‘How is she looking?’
 ‘Tired and miserable, poor heart. Years and years older
than when you saw her last. Quite a staid, worn woman now.
’Tis the man;—she can’t stomach un, even now!’
‘If Jude had been alive to see her, he would hardly have
cared for her any more, perhaps.’
‘That’s what we don’t know.… Didn’t he ever ask you to
send for her, since he came to see her in that strange way?’
‘No. Quite the contrary. I offered to send, and he said I
was not to let her know how ill he was.’
‘Did he forgive her?’
‘Not as I know.’
‘Well—poor little thing, ’tis to be believed she’s found
forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found peace!’
‘She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon
her necklace till she’s hoarse, but it won’t be true!’ said
Arabella. ‘She’s never found peace since she left his arms,
and never will again till she’s as he is now!’

1. Esther 14.2. (Though the Book of Esther is in the Bible, this section of it is
included in the Apocrypha.)
2. From Robert Browning’s poem “Too Late.”
3. The annual Commemoration day at Oxford marks the end of the academic
year. Hardy was in Oxford for Commemoration in June 1893.
4. The Sheldonian. “Italian porch”: St. Mary’s, the university church, has a 17th-
century porch in Italian style. “Helical”: spiral.
5. The scarlet academic dress of those holding doctors’ degrees. (After his
death, Hardy’s body was wrapped in the scarlet gown of the honorary
doctorate bestowed by Cambridge University.)
6. The Lycaonians witnessed a miracle performed by Saint Paul (Acts 14).
7. Ecclesiastes 6.12 (with omissions).
8. The lens in a telescope or microscope nearest the object.
9. The allusion is in part to Luke 2.41–42. When Jesus was twelve years old, he
went to Jerusalem with his parents for the feast of the Passover. He went to
Jerusalem again before his crucifixion.
10. Caiaphas was the Jewish high priest. Jesus was tried before him and
afterwards handed over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced
him to be crucified (Matthew 26–27)—hence, from bad to worse.
11. Built within the walls of a larger building.
12. The fictitious names are symbolically appropriate: a sarcophagus is a stone
coffin; a rubric is part of a prescribed order of divine service.
13. Here, a mean street off a main thoroughfare.
14. 1 Corinthians 4.9.
15. There was a vigorous ecclesiastical controversy in the 19th century
concerning whether a priest celebrating Holy Communion should face east
(i.e., with his back to the congregation) or west.
16. “The whole creation groaneth” (Romans 8.22).
17. Reason for existence.
18. Line 65 of Aeschylus’s tragedy.
19. Assuage or mitigate.
20. Superstitiously fearful.
21. Echoes Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations.
22. The uppermost courses of masonry or brickwork in a wall, usually sloping.
23. “The Sensitive Plant” (1820) is the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
24. The allusion is to a poem by Robert Burns (1759–1796), “On Captain Grose’s
Peregrinations Through Scotland.”
25. Doctrine that priests are invested with supernatural powers by virtue of their
ordination.
26. Fairy.
27. When Jesus died, “the veil of the temple was rent in twain” (Mark 15.38).
28. Hysterical.
29. In Greek mythology, Rhadamanthus was one of the judges in the underworld
and was noted for his severity.
30. In Greek mythology, Acheron was a river of Hades (the underworld),
associated with gloom and darkness.
31. From Robert Browning’s poem “The Statue and the Bust.”
32. 1 Corinthians 13.5.
33. Horse-drawn vehicle.
34. Coarse fabric, worn as penitential or mourning garb.
35. Nightdresses or dressing gowns. “Open-work”: embroidery.
36. One with old-fashioned ideas.
37. Deliberate, premeditated.
38. Feasting, merrymaking.
39. The name Susanna is derived from the Hebrew for “lily.”
40. Adapted from 1 Corinthians 3.15.
41. Instruments for measuring and pattern making.
42. Scolding, quarreling with.
43. Intoxicated, on a drinking bout.
44. The Holy State and the Profane State (1642) by Thomas Fuller (1608–1661).
45. 1 Corinthians 13.3.
46. Arabella is quoting the marriage service of the Church of England; see here.
47. Another echo of the earlier passage.
48. Steel rod with handle, used for sharpening knives.
49. Strangest.
50. Judges 16.19. The allusion recalls the earlier references (see here and here).
51. Ill.
52. Of an hour.
53. The town of Capernaum (usual spelling) figures frequently in the Gospel
accounts of Christ’s ministry (see also p. 66). Hardy may here have had in
mind either Matthew 4.16 (“The people who sat in darkness saw great light”)
or Matthew 11.23 (“And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven,
shall be brought down to hell”).
54. Whore of Babylon, a term of abuse derived from Revelation 17 and applied
by the Puritans to the Roman Catholic Church.
55. Supple, flexible.
56. Literally, a side of pork or bacon; here, stout or heavily built.
57. Surly, awkward.
58. September 29.
59. Prostitute.
60. Othello speaks of the innocent and maligned Desdemona as “smooth as
monumental alabaster. Yet she must die” (Othello 5.2).
61. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician and author. Dr. Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784) was for a short time at Pembroke College, Oxford. The others
named were also Oxford figures.
62. Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
“Poet of Liberty”: Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hardy’s manuscript shows that he
originally wrote “the poet of the West Wind” (alluding to Shelley’s famous
ode).
63. Richard Hooker (1554?–1600), theological writer. Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?–
1618), poet, soldier, and voyager. John Wycliffe, 14th-century religious
reformer and translator of the Bible. William Harvey (1578–1657) discovered
the circulation of the blood.
64. Adapted from lines 846–52 of Sophocles’ play.
65. Undress (dialect).
66. Stays (dialect).
67. An impure form of benzene. Benzoline lamps were first sold in 1864.
68. Reminiscent of Hamlet 1.2.141–42.
69. Part of metal framework of umbrella over which silk is stretched.
70. Commemoration (see here).
71. Job 3.3–4, 7, 11, 13, 18–20.
72. Races on the river.
BACKGROUNDS AND
CONTEXTS
Composition, Publication, and
Text

JOHN PATERSON
[Hardy’s Change of Direction]†
The manuscript of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure discloses that
the novel must have undergone, in the very first stages of
its composition, a basic reorganization in conception. It
discloses that the situation with which the novel now opens
and out of which the action now develops was antedated by
a situation so markedly different in its minor and major
details as to suggest a novel strikingly at variance with that
which was finally to materialize. The indications are, in fact,
that what was undertaken as a critical examination of the
educational system in Hardy’s time came inadvertently, in
its working out, to take in an equally critical examination of
the sacrament and institution of marriage.
In its definitive form, Jude the Obscure opens with the
departure of the schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, for the
university city of Christminster. Inspired by his memory and
example, the orphaned Jude (who has been the ward of his
aunt Drusilla in Marygreen for close to a year) comes to
nourish a nearly hopeless passion for Christminster and,
during the remainder of the novel’s Part I, seeks painfully to
qualify himself for admission to the celestial city. Although
intermittently and briefly alluded to, Sue Bridehead, the
heroine of the novel, does not appear on the scene until
early in Part II when Jude arrives as a young man in the
heavenly Jerusalem of his imagination. It has been
intimated, in the meanwhile, that with the failure of her
parents’ marriage. Sue has been taken as a child to London
and has later found her own way to the university city.
The manuscript makes clear, however, that the novel
originally was predicated upon a radically different set of
terms and circumstances. For one thing, where Jude is now
said to have been in Marygreen for a year, he was initially
said to have been in Marygreen for only a month. For
another, where Sue is now conceived as the child of
divorced parents and as having been taken up to London
either by her father or her mother, she was earlier
conceived as an orphan who had been adopted by the
provost of a college at Christminster. More crucially, the
schoolmaster who now enters the novel in the first chapter
was not, according to Hardy’s original plan, to have entered
it until much later, if indeed he was meant to enter it at all.
At the same time, the heroine who does not appear until the
early stages of Part II was formerly scheduled to appear in
the very first chapters of Part I. As a result, where Jude’s
passion for Christminster is now motivated by the example
of the schoolmaster, it was, according to the original terms
of the novel, to have been motivated by the example of the
precocious Sue Bridehead.

† From John Paterson. “The Genesis of Jude the Obscure,” Studies in Philology
57 (1960): 87–88. Copyright © 1960 by the University of North Carolina
Press. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.
 ROBERT C. SLACK
[Hardy’s Revisions]†
The textual history of Jude the Obscure, as of any Hardy
novel, is a complicated matter. * * *
Even the “first edition” text of this novel offers
complications, since there were actually two “first editions,”
one English and one American. The company of Osgood and
McIlvaine published the true first edition in London on
November 1, 1895. On November 9, the American first
edition of the novel was published by Harpers. There are
many insignificant textual differences between these two
editions. Besides changing to American spelling, the Harper
edition uses closer punctuation throughout and contains a
number of minor textual changes, many of which may have
been errors by Harper’s typesetters. However, though the
textual differences between these two editions are
numerous, they are trifling in nature.
Eight years later, in 1903, a “New Edition” of Jude was
issued by Hardy’s new English publishers, Macmillan and
Company. That edition contained almost thirty instances of
textual revision.
The most striking revision was Hardy’s tempering of the
scene branded by Mrs. Oliphant as “more brutal in depravity
than anything which the darkest slums could bring forth.” It
is the scene in which Arabella first makes Jude’s
acquaintance by flinging the pizzle of a pig at him as he is
walking along dreaming of becoming a learned Doctor of
Divinity. The whole tone of the relationship between the
coarse, sensual Arabella and her idealistic victim is perfectly
established by her choice of missile, and this tone is
strongly maintained throughout the scene as it was
originally written. Hardy, no doubt sensitive to the many
outcries like Mrs. Oliphant’s, deliberately emasculated the
passage in his revision. The scene is worth quoting at
length.
[Jude was walking along home dreaming of his
future, saying to himself, “Yes, Christminster shall be
my Alma Mater; and I’ll be her beloved son,” when a
clammy substance struck him in the ear. Perceiving
what the object was, he mounted the bank of a stream
and saw on the other side three girls washing pigs’
chitterlings in the running water.]
“Thank you!” said Jude severely.
“I didn’t throw it, I tell you!” asserted one girl to her
neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man’s
presence.
“Nor I,” the second answered.
“O, Anny, how can you!” said the third.
“If I had thrown anything at all,
[OM’95] it shouldn’t [M’o3] it shouldn’t have
have been such an been that!”
indecent thing as that!”
“Pooh! I don’t care for him!” And they laughed and
continued their work, without looking up, still
ostentatiously accusing each other.
Jude grew sarcastic
[OM’95] as he wiped [M’o3] as he wiped his
the spot where the face, and caught their
clammy flesh had remarks.
struck him.
“You didn’t do it—O no!” he said to the up-stream
one of the three.
She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl,
not exactly handsome, but capable of passing as such
at a little distance, despite some coarseness of skin and
fibre. She had a round and prominent bosom, full lips,
perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin
hen’s egg. She was a complete and
[OM’95] substantial [M’o3] substantial
female human— female animal—
no more, no less; and Jude was almost certain that to
her was attributable
[OM’95] the enterprise [M’o3] the enterprise of
of throwing the lump of attracting his attention
offal at him, the from dreams of the
bladder, from which humaner letters to
she had obviously just what was simmering in
cut it off, lying close the minds around him.
beside her.
“That you’ll never be told,” said she deedily.
“Whoever did it was wasteful of other people’s
property.”
[OM’95] “O, that’s [M’o3] “O, that’s
nothing. The pig is my nothing.
father’s.”
“But you want it “But you want to
back, I suppose?” speak to me, I
suppose?”
“O yes; if you like to “O yes; if you like
give it me.” to.”
“Shall I throw it “Shall I clamber
across, or will you across, or will you
come to the plank come to the plank
above here for me to above here?”
hand it to you?”
Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity; for somehow or
other the eyes of the brown girl rested in his own when
he said the words, and there was a momentary flash of
intelligence, a dumb announcement of affinity in pose,
between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley
was concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it. She
saw that he had singled her out from the three, as a
woman is singled out in such cases, for no reasoned
purpose of further acquaintance, but in commonplace
obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters,
unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the
last intention of their lives is to be occupied with the
feminine.
Springing to her feet, she said:
[OM’95] “Don’t throw [M’o3] “Bring back
it! Give it to me.” what is lying there.”
Jude was now aware Jude was now aware
that the intrinsic value that no message on
of the missile had any matter connected
nothing to do with her with her father’s
request. He set down business had prompted
his basket of tools, her signal to him. He
raked out with his stick set down his basket of
the slip of flesh from tools, beat a pathway
the ditch, and got over for himself with his
the hedge. stick, and got over the
hedge.
They walked in parallel lines, one on each bank of the
stream, towards the small plank bridge. As the girl drew
nearer to it, she gave, without Jude perceiving it, an
adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in
succession, by which curious and original manoeuvre
she brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund
surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to retain
there as long as she continued to smile. This production
of dimples at will was a not unknown operation, which
many attempted, but only a few succeeded in
accomplishing.
They met in the middle of the plank, and
[OM’95] Jude held out [M’o3] Jude, tossing
his stick with the back her missile,
fragment of pig seemed to expect her
dangling therefrom, to explain why she had
looking elsewhere the audaciously stopped
while, and faintly him by this novel
colouring. artillery instead of by
She, too, looked in hailing him.
another direction, and But she, slily looking
took the piece as in another direction,
though ignorant of swayed herself
what her hand was backwards and
doing. She hung it forwards on her hand
temporarily on the rail as it clutched the rail of
of the bridge, and then, the bridge; till, moved
by a species of mutual by amatory curiosity,
curiosity, they both she turned her eyes
turned, and regarded it. critically upon him.
“You don’t think I “You don’t think I
threw it?” would shy things at
“O no.” you?”
It belongs to father, “O no.”
and he med have been “We are doing this
in a taking if he had for my father, who
wanted it. He makes it doesn’t want anything
into dubbin.” thrown away.”
“What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?”
Jude asked, politely accepting her assertion, though he
had very large doubts as to its truth.
“Impudence. Don’t tell folk it was I, mind!”
“How can I? I don’t know your name.”
“Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?”
“Do!”
“Arabella Donn. I’m living here.”
 “I must have known it if I had often come this way.
But I mostly go straight along the high-road.”
“My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are
helping me wash the innerds for
[OM’95] black-puddings [M’o3] black-puddings
and chitterlings.” and such like.”
They talked a little more and a little more,
[OM’95] as they stood [M’o3] as they stood
regarding the limp regarding each other
object dangling across and leaning against the
the handrail of the handrail of the bridge.
bridge.
The unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered
very distinctly by Arabella’s personality, held Jude to
the spot against his intention—almost against his will,
and in a way new to his experience.…
[They talked a while longer, and Jude obtained
permission to call on her the next day.]
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept
him almost tenderly with her eyes in turning,
[OM’95] and throwing [M’o3] and retracing
the offal out of the way her steps down the
upon the grass, brookside grass,
rejoined her rejoined her
companions. companions.
[After Jude left, the girls talked together about him.
One of them said:]
“… he’s as simple as a child. I could see it as you
courted
[OM’95] on the bridge, [M’o3] on the bridge,
wi’ that piece o’ the pig when he looked at ’ee
 hanging between ye— as if he had never seen
haw-haw! What a a woman before in his
proper thing to court born days.
over!
Well, he’s to be had by any woman who can get him to
care for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him
the right way.”
In his revision, Hardy consistently shied away from “that
piece o’ the pig,” and the scene is of course weakened. But
Hardy several times before this—for magazine publication,
at any rate—had made similar artistic concessions to editors
and to public taste. By comparison this was a minor
yielding.
In this scene, and in the other revisions for the Macmillan
1903 “New Edition,” Hardy was as economical as an author
can be. Macmillan reused the original plates of the Osgood,
McIlvaine edition of 1895, and the textual alterations were
made usually by inserting a changed word or phrase in the
old line of type. Hardy cooperated by choosing substitute
words or phrases of the same physical length almost to the
letter. This resulted in a certain awkwardness, at times, in
the revised passages; but apparently Hardy was more
concerned with meaning, in these revisions, than with style.
Other than recasting the foregoing scene, Hardy made
twenty-eight isolated changes in the text of the novel, most
of them minor corrections of fact.
A striking oversight had appeared in the first edition of
the novel. As the Osgood, McIlvaine 1895 edition tells the
story, Jude is torn between the desire to keep his
appointment with Arabella and the desire to study his Greek
Testament. Arabella of course finally wins out, and—
H KAINH ΔIAΘHKH was suddenly closed, and the
predestinate Jude sprang up and across the room.
After his outing he returns home feeling guilty, to
experience a dramatically effective but factually impossible
chastisement.
He went upstairs without a light, and the dim interior of
his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his
book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters
on the title-page regarded him with fixed reproach in
the grey starlight, like the unclosed eyes of a dead
man:
H KAINH ΔIAΘHKH.
In the Macmillan 1903 edition, the book was never closed;
Hardy corrected the passage to read:
H KAINH ΔIAΘHKH was no more heeded, and the
predestinate Jude sprang up and across the room.

* * *
In 1912 Macmillan and Company published their definitive
“Wessex Edition” of Hardy’s works. In his Preface to the Jude
of that edition, Hardy wrote:
Nor am I able, across the gap of years since the
production of the novel, to exercise more criticism upon
it of a general kind than extends to a few verbal
corrections.…
The “few” verbal corrections amounted to quite a few. There
are 206 variants between the Macmillan 1903 text and the
Macmillan 1912 text. Not one of the changes is extensive or
very significant in itself; yet their number shows that Hardy
gave the text of Jude a careful going-over for his final,
definitive edition. This constitutes a second revision of the
text.
The most numerous changes are those which appear to
have been made for stylistic reasons. For instance, Hardy no
doubt wished to remove the double-entendre that originally
appeared as “A new-made wife can usually manage to look
interesting for a few weeks.” This was changed to “A new-
made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few
weeks.” In places Hardy has added nonintegral material to
the text, to heighten the effectiveness of a passage. In the
scuffle which developed over the attempt to force Phillotson
to resign his post at Shaston after Sue had left him, the
1903 passage has “an inkbottle spilled over a town-
councillor’s shirt-front, and some black eyes and bleeding
noses given” (p. 311). The 1912 revision contains an
interesting addition: “an inkbottle was spilled over a town-
councillor’s shirtfront, a church-warden was dealt such a
topper with the map of Palestine that his head went right
through Samaria, and many black eyes and bleeding noses
were given” (p. 299). Such changes and non-integral
additions as these appear to have been made to the text for
general stylistic reasons.
Almost a third of the total number of changes are ones in
which Hardy makes details more explicit. In the 1903 book,
Sue ran back to Jude and they merely “kissed each other”
(p. 272); whereas in the 1912 version they “kissed close and
long” (p. 261). In the earlier book the waiting-maid at the
George tells Sue that Jude had been to that very hotel a
month or two before with “A handsome, full-figured woman”
(p. 304). In the later reading the maid adds to her remark:
“A handsome, full-figured woman. They had this room” (p.
291). In the 1903 text, when Jude and the pregnant Sue are
hunting a lodging in Christminster, before refusing them,
“The householder scrutinized Sue a moment” (p. 415). In
the 1912 version Hardy says explicitly what he wants to:
“The householder scrutinized Sue’s figure a moment” (p.
397).
Other changes include correction of facts (such as the
correction of a quotation from Poe’s “The Raven”) and a few
alterations which appear to be printer’s errors.
 But the most interesting of the revisions are a small group
which change the affective meaning of a detail or of a
passage. These differ from simple alteration of facts in that
they reflect a different interpretation of characters or events
on the part of the author. Many of these are concerned with
Sue Bridehead. Perhaps Hardy felt that his original drawing
of her was somewhat harsh, that he had made her a bit too
rigid, for these changes tend to give her more human
sympathy than the original Sue possessed. Since this is the
one group of revisions from the 1903 edition which has a
consistent direction, it is worthwhile to examine them.
The most pronounced of these changes occurs when Sue
is leaving Phillotson, who has so generously given her her
freedom. So that the omnibusman would not suspect she
was leaving him, Phillotson “was obliged to make an
appearance of kissing her as he wished her goodbye,
though she shrank even from that.” Thus, in Hardy’s earlier
version, Sue is seen to be so wrapped up in her own
reactions that she is callously inconsiderate of the man who
is acting so generously toward her. In the revision, this
passage reads: “to make an appearance of kissing her as he
wished her good-bye, which she quite understood and
imitated.” This is a different Sue.
Surely no male reader of this novel will deny the force of
Jude’s impatient outburst at Sue the night she attempts to
prevent him from going to Arabella: “I do love you, Sue,
though I have danced attendance on you so long for such
poor returns! … I should just like a few virtuous people who
have condemned me in the past, about Arabella and other
things, to have been in my tantalizing position with you
through these late weeks!” She has never once given him
even a “candid declaration that she loved or could love
him.”
To prevent Jude’s going to Arabella, Sue agrees to live
intimately with him. She cries:
MACMILLAN 1903 MACMILLAN 1912
“… But, yes—I agree, I “… But, yes—I agree, I
agree! I ought to have agree! I do love you. I
known that you would ought to have known
conquer in the long that [etc.]” (p. 321)
run, living like this!” (p.
334)
The change is slight, but the words I do love you make
a world of difference to Jude.
There are other, more subtle, changes of this nature
which show Sue capable of a bit more womanly
sympathy.
MACMILLAN 1903 —MACMILLAN 1912
[After Jude tells Sue of
his marriage to
Arabella, she is, at first
angry; then she cries,
and says:] “I am—not “I am—not crying—
crying—because I love because I meant to—
you; but because of love you; but because
your want of— [etc.]” (p. 200)
confidence!” (p. 207)
[Sue has met Jude on
the train and told him
that she did not mean
to live with him as he
had understood. He is “… I didn’t dislike you
disappointed, and she to, I own it, Jude.…” (p.
says to him:] “You did 289)
kiss me just now, you
know; and I didn’t
dislike you to, very
much, Jude.…” (p. 302)
 [After the death of
the children, Sue
decides to live apart
from Jude. He analyzes
her thus:] “… Yours is
not a passionate heart
—your heart does not “… You are, upon the
burn in a flame! You whole, a sort of fay, or
are, upon the whole, sprite—not a woman!”
cold,—a sort of fay, or (p. 426)
sprite—not a woman!”
(p. 445)
The revision of a speech of Jude’s tends to soften one of
the harsher aspects of Sue’s character. She has the habit of
blowing hot and cold, of telling and then wishing she hadn’t,
of putting Jude off by her actions and then impulsively
writing a note that leaves him all in a glow. In the Macmillan
1903 text, Jude refers to this habit in blunt terms: “… you
are never so nice in your real presence as you are in your
letters!” Hardy softened the statement in his revision to: “…
you are often not so nice in [etc.]”
A little humanizing touch is given to Sue’s character when
she is proposing to Phillotson that she leave him to live with
Jude. Originally she quotes John Stuart Mill like a professor:
“She, or he, ‘who lets the world, or his own portion of it,
choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.’ J. S. Mill’s
words, those are. Why can’t you act upon them? I wish
to, always.”
In the revision, after the quotation, Sue says: “J. S. Mill’s
words, those are. I have been reading it up. Why can’t you
[etc.]” One likes Sue better for admitting that she has been
“reading up” Mill; this reminder of human fallibility appeals
to our sympathy.
 When Phillotson is about to remarry Sue, he sums up her
character for his friend Gillingham. He says.
MACMILLAN 1903 MACMILLAN 1912
“No doubt when it gets
known what I’ve done I
shall be thought a soft “… But they don’t know
fool by many. But they Sue as I do.
don’t know Sue as I do. Though so elusive, hers
Hers is such a straight is such an honest
and open nature that I nature at bottom that I
don’t think she has don’t think she has
ever done anything ever done anything
against her against her
conscience.…” (p. 464) conscience.…” (p. 445)
Hardy has pointedly changed Phillotson’s concept of Sue. A
“straight and open” (and rather inconsiderate) nature is
seen in the revision as one which is elusive, but honest at
bottom. “Elusive” allows a kind of charm which “straight and
open” seems to prohibit.
All these textual changes which pertain to Sue are slight,
and each one in itself is of minor importance. But the
cumulative effect of all of them does somewhat alter a
reader’s concept of her. She has become more of a daughter
of Eve than she was before; she is a shade more
sympathetic, more elusive, more charming.

† From Robert C. Slack, “The Text of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure,” Nineteenth
Century Fiction 11 (1957): 261–75.
 Hardy’s Nonfictional Writings

From Hardy’s Autobiography†

[The two-volume “biography” of Hardy which was published
soon after his death with his widow’s name—Florence Emily
—on the title pages is now known to be almost entirely an
autobiography, written during the last ten years of his life
and making extensive use of old diaries, notebooks, and
letters. The autobiography was originally issued as The Early
Life of Thomas Hardy (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas
Hardy (1930). Since 1962 it has been available as a single
volume, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London:
Macmillan & Co.).]

One or two more characteristics of his personality at this

childhood-time can be recounted. In those days the
staircase at Bockhampton (later removed) had its walls
coloured Venetian red by his father, and was so situated
that the evening sun shone into it, adding to its colour a
great intensity for a quarter of an hour or more. Tommy
used to wait for this chromatic effect, and, sitting alone
there, would recite to himself ‘And now another day is gone’
from Dr. Watts’s Hymns, with great fervency, though
perhaps not for any religious reason, but from a sense that
the scene suited the lines.
It is not therefore to be wondered at that a boy of this sort
should have a dramatic sense of the church services, and on
wet Sunday mornings should wrap himself in a tablecloth,
and read the Morning Prayer standing in a chair, his cousin
playing the clerk with loud Amens, and his grandmother
representing the congregation. The sermon which followed
was simply a patchwork of sentences used by the vicar.
Everybody said that Tommy would have to be a parson,
being obviously no good for any practical pursuit; which
remark caused his mother many misgivings.
One event of this date or a little later stood out, he used
to say, more distinctly than any. He was lying on his back in
the sun, thinking how useless he was, and covered his face
with his straw hat. The sun’s rays streamed through the
interstices of the straw, the lining having disappeared.
Reflecting on his experiences of the world so far as he had
got, he came to the conclusion that he did not wish to grow
up. Other boys were always talking of when they would be
men; he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess
things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to
know no more people than he already knew (about half a
dozen). Yet this early evidence of that lack of social ambition
which followed him through life was shown when he was in
perfect health and happy circumstances.

* * *
April 28. A short story of a young man—“who could not go
to Oxford”—His struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide.
[Probably the germ of Jude the Obscure]. There is something
[in this] the world ought to be shown, and I am the one to
show it to them—though I was not altogether hindered
going, at least to Cambridge, and could have gone up easily
at five-and-twenty.1
 * * *
[At the end of the summer of 1895, Hardy]2 was ‘restoring
the MS. of Jude the Obscure to its original state’—on which
process he sets down an undated remark, probably about
the end of August, when he sent off the restored copy to the
publishers:
‘On account of the labour of altering Jude the Obscure to
suit the magazine, and then having to alter it back, I have
lost energy for revising and improving the original as I
meant to do.’

* * *
The onslaught upon Jude started by the vituperative
section of the press—unequalled in violence since the
publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads thirty years
before—was taken up by the anonymous writers of libellous
letters and post-cards, and other such gentry. It spread to
America and Australia, whence among other appreciations
he received a letter containing a packet of ashes, which the
virtuous writer stated to be those of his iniquitous novel.
Thus, though Hardy with his quick sense of humour could
not help seeing a ludicrous side to it all, and was well
enough aware that the evil complained of was what these
‘nice minds with nasty ideas’ had read into his book, and not
what he had put there, he underwent the strange
experience of beholding a sinister lay figure of himself
constructed by them, which had no sort of resemblance to
him as he was, and which he, and those who knew him well,
would not have recognized as being meant for himself if it
had not been called by his name. Macaulay’s remark in his
essay on Byron was well illustrated by, Thomas Hardy’s
experience at this time: ‘We know of no spectacle so
ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of
morality.’
 * * *
When they got back to Dorchester during December
Hardy had plenty of time to read the reviews of Jude that
continued to pour out. Some paragraphists knowingly
assured the public that the book was an honest
autobiography, and Hardy did not take the trouble to deny it
till more than twenty years later, when he wrote to an
inquirer with whom the superstition still lingered that no
book he had ever written contained less of his own life,
which of course had been known to his friends from the
beginning. Some of the incidents were real in so far as that
he had heard of them, or come in contact with them when
they were occurring to people he knew; but no more. It is
interesting to mention that on his way to school he did once
meet with a youth like Jude who drove the bread-cart of a
widow, a baker, like Mrs. Fawley, and carried on his studies
at the same time, to the serious risk of other drivers in the
lanes; which youth asked him to lend him his Latin
grammar. But Hardy lost sight of this featful student, and
never knew if he profited by his plan.
Hardy makes a remark on one or two of the reviews:
‘Tragedy may be created by an opposing environment
either of things inherent in the universe, or of human
institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and
deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as
subversive and dangerous; when all the while he may never
have questioned the necessity or urged the nonnecessity of
either.…’

* * *
[Hardy and his wife spent the 1896 ‘season’ in London.]3
* * * at the very height of the season the Bishop of
Wakefield announced in a letter to the papers that he had
thrown Hardy’s novel into the fire. Knowing the difficulty of
burning a thick book even in a good fire, and the
infrequency of fires of any sort in summer, Hardy was mildly
sceptical of the literal truth of the bishop’s story; but
remembering that Shelley, Milton, and many others of the
illustrious, reaching all the way back to the days of
Protagoras, had undergone the same sort of indignity at the
hands of bigotry and intolerance he thought it a pity in the
interests of his own reputation to disturb the episcopal
narrative of adventures with Jude. However, it appeared
that, further,—to quote the testimony in the Bishop’s Life—
the scandalized prelate was not ashamed to deal a blow
below the belt, but ‘took an envelope out of his paperstand
and addressed it to W. F. D. Smith, Esq., M.P. The result was
the quiet withdrawal of the book from the library, and an
assurance that any other books by the same author would
be carefully examined before they were allowed to be
circulated.’ Of this precious conspiracy Hardy knew nothing,
or it might have moved a mind which the burning could not
stir to say a word on literary garrotting. In his ignorance of it
he remained silent, being fully aware of one thing, that the
ethical teaching of the novel, even if somewhat crudely put,
was as high as that of any of the bishop’s sermons—
(indeed, Hardy was afterwards reproached for its being ‘too
much of a sermon’). And thus feeling quite calm on the
ultimate verdict of Time he merely reflected on the
shallowness of the episcopal view of the case and of morals
generally, which brought to his memory a witty remark he
had once read in a Times leading article, to the effect that
the qualities which enabled a man to become a bishop were
often the very reverse of those which made a good bishop
when he became one.
The only sad feature in the matter to Hardy was that if
the bishop could have known him as he was, he would have
found a man whose personal conduct, views of morality, and
of the vital facts of religion, hardly differed from his own.
 Possibly soured by all this he wrote a little while after his
birthday:
‘Every man’s birthday is a first of April for him; and he
who lives to be fifty and won’t own it is a rogue or a fool,
hypocrite or simpleton.’

* * *
‘Max Gate. October 17. A novel, good, microscopic touch
in Crabbe [which would strike one trained in architecture].
He gives surface without outline, describing his church by
telling the colour of the lichens.
‘Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas
and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized
opinion—hard as a rock—which the vast body of men have
vested interests in supporting.

* * *

† From F. E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan,

1962), pp. 15–16, 207–8, 268–69, 270, 274, 277–80, 392. Bracketed notes are
Hardy’s except where indicated.
1. An extract from Hardy’s diary, April 28, 1888.
2. Bracketed phrase added by the editor of the previous Norton Critical Edition.
3. Bracketed phrase added by the editor of the previous Norton Critical Edition.

Comments from Hardy’s Letters†

To Sir George Douglas1

October 8, 1892
As you know, or guess, I have passed through glooms such
as I hope you will never see: & I cannot say they were ever
the result of material surroundings.
To Mrs. Florence Henniker2
 Max Gate, | Dorchester. | Sunday. July 16, 1893

* * *
I too have been reading “Epipsychidion”—indeed by
mutual influence we must have been reading it
simultaneously. I had a regret in reading it at thinking that
one who is pre-eminently the child of the Shelleyean
tradition—whom one would have expected to be an ardent
disciple of his school and views—should have allowed
herself to be enfeebled to a belief in ritualistic
ecclesiasticism. My impression is that you do not know your
own views. You feel the need of emotional expression of
some sort, and being surrounded by the conventional
society form of such expression you have mechanically
adopted it. Is this the daughter of the man who went from
Cambridge to Oxford on the now historic errand! Depend
upon it there are other values for feeling than the
ordinances of Mother Church—my Mother Church no less
than yours.
I am writing too much as the mentor, and you may ask
me for my licence. Well; forgive me, and I will follow
Tennyson’s advice in future, (“Leave thou thy sister …”) and
trust to imagination only for an enfranchised woman. * * *
September 16, 1893
I have already jotted down a few notes for the next long
story—which I hope may be big as well as long.
October 22, 1893
What name shall I give to the heroine of my coming long
story when I get at it? I don’t quite know when that will be,
though it must be this winter.
December 1, 1893
I am not sure that I feel so keen about the, alas, unwritten,
long story as I should do. I feel more inclined just now to
write short ones. However, as it is one I planned a couple of
years ago I shall, I think, go on with it, and probably shall
warm up.
January 15, 1894
I am creeping on a little with the long story, and am
beginning to get interested in my heroine as she takes
shape and reality; though she is very nebulous at present.
To Sir George Douglas
March 3, 1895
Please don’t read it in the magazine, for I have been obliged
to make many changes, omissions, & glosses. It will be
restored to its original shape in the volume.
To Mrs. Florence Henniker
August 4, 1895
I am impatient to restore and revise the serial story for the
volume, and this [illness] has been a vexing hindrance.
August 12, 1895
I am restoring the MS. of the Harper story to its original
state. Fortunately I wrote the alterations and abridgments in
blue ink—which makes it easy to recover the first form.
Curiously enough, I am more interested in the Sue story
than in any I have written.
November 10, 1895
My hesitating to send Jude was not because I thought
you narrow—but because I had rather bored you with him
during the writing of some of the story, or thought I had.
 I am rather indifferent about his reception by the public:
and you may, of course, criticize quite freely without
offending me. Though not a novel with a purpose, I think it
turns out to be a novel which ‘makes for’ humanity—more
than any other I have written: an opinion that will probably
surprise you. I suppose I have missed the mark in the pig-
killing scene the papers are making such a fuss about: I fully
expected that, though described in that particular place for
the purely artistic reason of bringing out A[rabella]’s
character, it might serve a humane end in showing people
the cruelty that goes on unheeded under the barbarous
régime we call civilization.
It is curious that some papers consider the story a sort of
manifesto on the marriage question, though it is really one
about two persons who, by a hereditary curse of
temperament, peculiar to their family, are rendered unfit for
marriage, or think they are. The tragedy is really addressed
to those into whose souls the iron of adversity has deeply
entered at some time of their lives, and can hardly be
congenial to self-indulgent persons of ease and affluence.
Indeed, there is something bizarre in the tragedy of Jude
coming out as the last fashionable novel. But one cannot
choose one’s readers. I think you will admit that, if the story
had to be told, it c[oul]d not be told with more reticence.
To Sir Edmund Gosse3
November 10, 1895
* * * Your review [of Jude the Obscure] is the most
discriminating that has yet appeared. It required an artist to
see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed—I
ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point,
the characters necessitated it, and I simply let it come. As
for the story itself, it is really sent out to those into whose
souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some
time of their lives. But one cannot choose one’s readers.
 It is curious that some of the papers should look upon the
novel as a manifesto on ‘the marriage question’ (although,
of course, it involves it), seeing that it is concerned first with
the labours of a poor student to get a University degree, and
secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing
in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament
peculiar to the family of the parties. The only remarks which
can be said to bear on the general marriage question occur
in dialogue, and comprise no more than half a dozen pages
in a book of five hundred. And of these remarks I state (p.
362) that my own views are not expressed therein. I
suppose the attitude of these critics is to be accounted for
by the accident that, during the serial publication of my
story, a sheaf of “purpose” novels on the matter appeared.
You have hardly an idea how poor and feeble the book
seems to me, as executed, beside the idea of it that I had
formed in prospect. * * *
P.S. One thing I did not answer. The “grimy” features of
the story go to show the contrast between the ideal life a
man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to
lead. The throwing of the pizzle, at the supreme moment of
his young dream, is to sharply initiate this contrast. But I
must have lamentably failed, as I feel I have, if this requires
explanation and is not self-evident. The idea was meant to
run all through the novel. It is, in fact, to be discovered in
everybody’s life, though it lies less on the surface perhaps
than it does in my poor puppet’s.
November 20, 1895
You are quite right; there is nothing perverted or depraved
in Sue’s nature. The abnormalism consists in disproportion,
not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy as far as it
goes, but unusually weak and fastidious. Her sensibilities
remain painfully alert notwithstanding, as they do in nature
with such women. One point illustrating this I could not
dwell upon: that, though she has children, her intimacies
with Jude have never been more than occasional, even
when they were living together (I mention that they occupy
separate rooms, except towards the end), and one of her
reasons for fearing the marriage ceremony is that she fears
it would be breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself at
pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while uncontracted
she feels at liberty to yield herself as seldom as she
chooses. This has tended to keep his passion as hot at the
end as at the beginning, and helps to break his heart. He
has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.
Sue is a type of woman which has always had an
attraction for me, but the difficulty of drawing the type has
kept me from attempting it till now.
Of course the book is all contrasts—or was meant to be in
its original conception. Alas, what a miserable
accomplishment it is, when I compare it with what I meant
to make it!—e.g. Sue and her heathen gods set against
Jude’s reading the Greek testament; Christminster
academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude
the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint; marriage, no
marriage; &c., &c.
As to the “coarse” scenes with Arabella, the battle in the
schoolroom, etc., the newspaper critics might, I thought,
have sneered at them for their Fieldingism rather than for
their Zolaism. But your everyday critic knows nothing of
Fielding. I am read in Zola very little, but have felt akin
locally to Fielding, so many of his scenes having been laid
down this way, and his home near.
Did I tell you I feared I should seem too High-Churchy at
the end of the book where Sue recants? You can imagine my
surprise at some of the reviews.
To Sir George Douglas
December 9, 1895
Yes, “Jude” is doing very well. I find that London society is
not at all represented by the shocked critics.* * * I have
really not been much upset by their missiles heaved at the
poor book, not nearly so much as by my own opinion on its
shortcomings. Somehow I feel that the critics are not
sincere: everybody knows that silence is the remedy in the
case of immoral works. But they advertise it with
sensational headings because that advertises their
newspapers, a far more important matter with them than
so-called immorality.
One wonders why, in a book of 516 pages, they shd. dwell
exclusively on portions which wd. not fill the odd 16. For
moral reasons, doubtless, also. Someday perhaps it will be
seen that the purpose of the story was no ignoble one,
though in this, as in others, I have let the moral take care of
itself—as it always will, if one writes sincerely.
I hear that a rival novelist in Blackwood sneers at my
letting Jude appear in Harper’s. As a matter of fact I tried to
withdraw it, & asked them to cancel the contract; but it was
found impracticable.
To Messrs. Harper and Brothers
December 24, 1895
I write for the moment on another question respecting Jude.
I am much surprised, and I may say distressed, by the
nature of the attack on it in the N. Y. World, which has just
come into my hands. This is the only American notice of the
novel I have yet seen, except Mr. Howells’s in the WEEKLY. I
do not know how far the World is representative of American
feeling and opinion. But it is so much against my wish to
offend the tastes of the American public, or to thrust any
book of mine upon readers there, that if it should be in your
own judgment advisable, please withdraw the novel.
You will probably know that it has been received here with
about equal voices for and against—somewhat as was Tess
received. All sensible readers here see at least that the
intention of the book is honest and good. I myself thought it
was somewhat overburdened with the interests of morality.
To Sir Edmund Gosse
January 4, 1896
The rectangular lines of the story were not premeditated,
but came by chance: except, of course, that the involutions
of four lives must necessarily be a sort of quadrille. The only
point in the novel on which I feel sure is that it makes for
morality; and that delicacy or indelicacy in a writer is
according to his object. If I say to a lady “I met a naked
woman”, it is indelicate. But if I go on to say “I found she
was mad with sorrow”, it ceases to be indelicate. And in
writing Jude my mind was fixed on the ending.
To Mrs. Florence Henniker
June 1, 1896
The unexpected result of Jude is that I am overwhelmed with
requests for stories to an extent that I have never before
experienced—though I imagined before publishing it that it
w[oul]d considerably lower my commercial value. By the
way, I have been offended with you for some time, though I
have forgotten to say so, for what you said—that I was an
advocate for ‘free love.’ I hold no theory whatever on the
subject,—except by way of experimental remarks at tea
parties, and seriously I don’t see any possible scheme for
the union of the sexes that w[oul]d be satisfactory. * *
*There is a feeble attack on Jude in this month’s Fortnightly.
How much better I c[oul]d cut it up myself!

† The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael
Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press), Vol. 1 (1978), p. 285; Vol. 2 (1980), pp.
 24–25, 32, 38, 43, 47, 70, 84, 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 105, 122–23. Reprinted by
permission of the Trustees of Thomas Hardy. All notes are by the editor of the
previous Norton Critical Edition.
1. Douglas, Scottish baronet and man of letters, met Hardy in 1881; they
became close friends, visited each other frequently, and exchanged many
letters.
2. The Honourable Florence Ellen Hungerford Henniker, society hostess and
writer of fiction, met Hardy in May 1893, or possibly earlier. They quickly
became friends, collaborated in the tale “The Spectre of the Real” in October
1893, wrote frequently to each other, and remained friends until her death in
1923. It has been claimed that she inspired some of Hardy’s poems and that
Sue Bridehead was in part modeled on her (note that one of Sue’s names is
Florence).
3. Gosse (1849–1928), prolific man of letters and influential reviewer, is now
best remembered for his autobiographical Father and Son. He corresponded
frequently with Hardy.

The Tree of Knowledge†

[Hardy contributed the following short essay to The New
Review in May 1894, while the composition of Jude the
Obscure was in progress. It formed part of a symposium on
questions of marriage and sexual morality.]

To your first inquiry I would answer that a girl should

certainly not be allowed to enter into matrimony without a
full knowledge of her probable future in that holy estate,
and of the possibilities which may lie in the past of the elect
man.
I have not much faith in an innocent girl’s “discovery of
the great mysteries of life” by means of “the ordinary
intercourse of society.” Incomplete presentations, vicious
presentations, meretricious and seductive presentations, are
not unlikely in pursuing such investigations through such a
channel.
What would seem to be the most natural course is the
answer to your second question: that a plain handbook on
natural processes, specially prepared, should be placed in
the daughter’s hands, and, later on, similar information on
morbid contingencies. Innocent youths should, I think, also
receive the same instruction; for (if I may say a word out of
my part) it has never struck me that the spider is invariably
male and the fly invariably female.
As your problems are given on the old lines so I take
them, without entering into the general question whether
marriage, as we at present understand it, is such a desirable
goal for all women as it is assumed to be; or whether
civilisation can escape the humiliating indictment that, while
it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, in
literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never
succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory
scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.

† Reprinted in Ernest Brennecke Jr., Life and Art by Thomas Hardy (New York,
1925), pp. 118–19.

From Candour in English Fiction†

* * *
Conscientious fiction alone it is which can excite a reflective
and abiding interest in the minds of thoughtful readers of
mature age, who are weary of puerile inventions and
famishing for accuracy; who consider that, in
representations of the world, the passions ought to be
proportioned as in the world itself. This is the interest which
was excited in the minds of the Athenians by their immortal
tragedies, and in the minds of Londoners at the first
performance of the finer plays of three hundred years ago.
They reflected life, revealed life, criticised life. Life being a
physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely
concerned with, for one thing, the relations of the sexes,
and the substitution for such catastrophes as favour the
false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that
“they married and were happy ever after,” of catastrophes
based upon sexual relationship as it is. To this expansion
English society opposed a well-nigh insuperable bar.
The popular vehicles for the introduction of a novel to the
public have grown to be, from one cause and another, the
magazine and the circulating library; and the object of the
magazine and circulating library is not upward advance but
lateral advance; to suit themselves to what is called
household reading, which means, or is made to mean, the
reading either of the majority in a household or of the
household collectively. The number of adults, even in a large
household, being normally two, and these being the
members which, as a rule, have least time on their hands to
bestow on current literature, the taste of the majority can
hardly be, and seldom is, tempered by the ripe judgment
which desires fidelity. However, the immature members of a
household often keep an open mind, and they might, and no
doubt would, take sincere fiction with the rest but for
another condition, almost generally co-existent: which is
that adults who would desire true views for their own
reading insist, for a plausible but questionable reason, upon
false views for the reading of their young people.
As a consequence, the magazine in particular and the
circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the
novel which reflects and reveals life. They directly tend to
exterminate it by monopolising all literary space.

* * *
Were the objections of the scrupulous limited to a prurient
treatment of the relations of the sexes, or to any view of
vice calculated to undermine the essential principles of
social order, all honest lovers of literature would be in
accord with them. All really true literature directly or
indirectly sounds as its refrain the words in the Agamemnon:
“Chant Aelinon, Aelinon! but may the good prevail.” But the
writer may print the not of his broken commandment in
capitals of flame; it makes no difference. A question which
should be wholly a question of treatment is confusedly
regarded as a question of subject.
Why the ancient classic and old English tragedy can be
regarded thus deeply, both by young people in their teens
and by old people in their moralities, and the modern novel
cannot be so regarded; why the honest and
uncompromising delineation which makes the old stories
and dramas lessons in life must make of the modern novel,
following humbly on the same lines, a lesson in iniquity, is to
some thinkers a mystery inadequately accounted for by the
difference between old and new.
Whether minors should read unvarnished fiction based on
the deeper passions, should listen to the eternal verities in
the form of narrative, is somewhat a different question from
whether the novel ought to be exclusively addressed to
those minors. The first consideration is one which must be
passed over here; but it will be conceded by most friends of
literature that all fiction should not be shackled by
conventions concerning budding womanhood, which may be
altogether false. It behooves us then to inquire how best to
circumvent the present lording of nonage over maturity, and
permit the explicit novel to be more generally written.
That the existing magazine and book-lending system will
admit of any great modification is scarcely likely. As far as
the magazine is concerned it has long been obvious that as
a vehicle for fiction dealing with human feeling on a
comprehensive scale it is tottering to its fall; and it will
probably in the course of time take up openly the position
that it already covertly occupies, that of a purveyor of tales
for the youth of both sexes, as it assumes that tales for
those rather numerous members of society ought to be
written.
 There remain three courses by which the adult may find
deliverance. The first would be a system of publication
under which books could be bought and not borrowed, when
they would naturally resolve themselves into classes instead
of being, as now, made to wear a common livery in style
and subject, enforced by their supposed necessities in
addressing indiscriminately a general audience.
But it is scarcely likely to be convenient to either authors
or publishers that the periodical form of publication for the
candid story should be entirely forbidden, and in retaining
the old system thus far, yet ensuring that the emancipated
serial novel should meet the eyes of those for whom it is
intended, the plan of publication as a feuilleton in
newspapers read mainly by adults might be more generally
followed, as in France. In default of this, or co-existent with
it, there might be adopted what, upon the whole, would
perhaps find more favour than any with those who have
artistic interests at heart, and that is, magazines for adults,
exclusively for adults, if necessary. As an offshoot there
might be at least one magazine for the middle-aged and old.
There is no foretelling; but this (since the magazine form
of publication is so firmly rooted) is at least a promising
remedy, if English prudery be really, as we hope, only a
parental anxiety. There should be no mistaking the matter,
no half measures. La dignité de la pensée, in the words of
Pascal, might then grow to be recognised in the treatment of
fiction as in other things, and untrammelled adult opinion on
conduct and theology might be axiomatically assumed and
dramatically appealed to. Nothing in such literature should
for a moment exhibit lax views of that purity of life upon
which the well-being of society depends; but the position of
man and woman in nature, and the position of belief in the
minds of man and woman—things which everybody is
thinking but nobody is saying—might be taken up and
treated frankly.
† From Thomas Hardy, “Candour in English Fiction,” The New Review, January
1890, pp. 15–21.
 Hardy’s Poems†

To a Lady
Offended by a Book of the Writer’s

Now that my page is exiled,—doomed, maybe,

Never to press thy cosy cushions more,
Or wake thy ready Yeas as heretofore,
Or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me:
Knowing thy natural receptivity, 5
I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve,
My sombre image, warped by insidious heave
Of those less forthright, must lose place in thee.
So be it. I have borne such. Let thy dreams
Of me and mine diminish day by day, 10
And yield their space to shine of smugger things;
Till I shape to thee but in fitful gleams,
And then in far and feeble visitings,
And then surcease. Truth will be truth alway.

Thoughts of Phena
 At News of Her Death

Not a line of her writing have I,

Not a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling,
whereby
I may picture her there;
And in vain do I urge my unsight 5
To conceive my lost prize
At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were
upbrimming with light,
And with laughter her eyes.
What scenes spread around her last days,
Sad, shining, or dim? 10
Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her
sweet ways
With an aureate nimb?
Or did life-light decline from her years,
And mischances control
Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or 15
forebodings, or fears
Disennoble her soul?
Thus I do but the phantom retain
Of the maiden of yore
As my relic; yet haply the best of her—fined in my brain
It may be the more 20
That no line of her writing have I,
Nor a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling,
whereby
I may picture her there.
March 1890
 At an Inn
When we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.
They warmed as they opined 5
Us more than friends—
That we had all resigned
For love’s dear ends.
And that swift sympathy
With living love 10
Which quicks the world—maybe
The spheres above,
Made them our ministers,
Moved them to say,
‘Ah, God, that bliss like theirs 15
Would flush our day!’
And we were left alone
As Love’s own pair;
Yet never the love-light shone
Between us there! 20
But that which chilled the breath
Of afternoon,
And palsied unto death
The pane-fly’s tune.
The kiss their zeal foretold, 25
And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb.
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours? 30
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours?
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what 35
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,
Ere death, once let us stand
As we stood then! 40

In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury

The years have gathered grayly
Since I danced upon this leaze
With one who kindled gaily
Love’s fitful ecstasies!
But despite the term as teacher, 5
I remain what I was then
In each essential feature
Of the fantasies of men.
Yet I note the little chisel
Of never-napping Time 10
Defacing wan and grizzel
The blazon of my prime.
When at night he thinks me sleeping
I feel him boring sly
Within my bones, and heaping 15
Quaintest pains for by-and-by.
Still, I’d go the world with Beauty,
I would laugh with her and sing,
I would shun divinest duty
 To resume her worshipping. 20
But she’d scorn my brave endeavour,
She would not balm the breeze
By murmuring ‘Thine for ever!’
As she did upon this leaze.
1890

In Tenebris II
Considerabam ad dexteram, et videbam; et nan erat qui cognosceret
me.… non est qui requirat animam meam.’ —Ps. CXLI1

When the clouds’ swoln bosoms echo back the shouts

of the many and strong
That things are all as they best may be, save a few to
be right ere long,
And my eyes have not the vision in them to discern
what to these is so clear,
The blot seems straightway in me alone; one better he
were not here.
The stout upstanders say, All’s well with us: 5
ruers have nought to rue!
And what the potent say so oft, can it fail to be
somewhat true?
Breezily go they, breezily come; their dust smokes
around their career,
Till I think I am one born out of due time, who has no
calling here.
Their dawns bring lusty joys, it seems; their evenings
all that is sweet;
Our times are blessed times, they cry: Life 10
shapes it as is most meet,
And nothing is much the matter; there are many smiles
to a tear;
Then what is the matter is I, I say. Why should such an
one be here? …
Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by
the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a
full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth 15
cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he
disturbs the order here.
1895–96

A Thunderstorm in Town
(A Reminiscence: 1893)

She wore a new ‘terra-cotta’ dress,

And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm. 5
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more. 10

The Recalcitrants
Let us off and search, and find a place
Where yours and mine can be natural lives,
Where no one comes who dissects and dives
And proclaims that ours is a curious case,
Which its touch of romance can scarcely grace. 5
You would think it strange at first, but then
Everything has been strange in its time.
When some one said on a day of the prime
He would bow to no brazen god again
He doubtless dazed the mass of men. 10
None will see in us a pair whose claims
To righteous judgment we care not making;
Who have doubted if breath be worth the taking,
And have no respect for the current fames
Whence the savour has flown while abide the 15
names.
We have found us already shunned, disdained,
And for re-acceptance have not once striven;
Whatever offence our course has given
The brunt thereof we have long sustained.
Well, let us away, scorned, unexplained. 20

Midnight on the Great Western

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came. 5
In the band of his hat the journeying boy
Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
 Like a living thing. 10
What past can be yours, O journeying boy
Towards a world unknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite
On all at stake, can undertake
This plunge alone? 15
Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
This region of sin that you find you in,
But are not of? 20

The Young Glass-Stainer

‘These Gothic windows, how they wear me out
With cusp and foil, and nothing straight or square,
Crude colours, leaden borders roundabout,
And fitting in Peter here, and Matthew there!

‘What a vocation! Here do I draw now 5

The abnormal, loving the Hellenic norm;
Martha I paint, and dream of Hera’s brow,
Mary, and think of Aphrodite’s form.’
Nov. 1893

The Son’s Portrait

I walked the streets of a market town,
And came to a lumber-shop,
Which I had known ere I met the frown
Of fate and fortune,
 And habit led me to stop. 5
In burrowing mid this chattel and that,
High, low, or edgewise thrown,
I lit upon something lying flat—
A fly-flecked portrait,
Framed. ’Twas my dead son’s own. 10
‘That photo? … A lady—I know not whence—
Sold it me, Ma’am, one day,
With more. You can have it for eighteenpence:
The picture’s nothing;
It’s but for the frame you pay.’ 15
He had given it her in their heyday shine,
When she wedded him, long her wooer:
And then he was sent to the front-trench-line,
And fell there fighting;
And she took a new bridegroom to her. 20
I bought the gift she had held so light,
And buried it—as ’twere he.—
Well, well! Such things are trifling, quite,
But when one’s lonely
How cruel they can be! 25

Childhood among the Ferns

I sat one sprinkling day upon the lea,
Where tall-stemmed ferns spread out luxuriantly,
And nothing but those tall ferns sheltered me.
The rain gained strength, and damped each lopping
frond,
Ran down their stalks beside me and beyond, 5
And shaped slow-creeping rivulets as I conned,
 With pride, my spray-roofed house. And though anon
Some drops pierced its green rafters, I sat on,
Making pretence I was not rained upon.

The sun then burst, and brought forth a sweet 10

breath
From the limp ferns as they dried underneath:
I said: ‘I could live on here thus till death;’
And queried in the green rays as I sate:
‘Why should I have to grow to man’s estate,
And this afar-noised World perambulate?’ 15

† From Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London:
Macmillan, 1976, 2001), pp. 65, 62, 68–69, 70, 168, 312–13, 389, 514, 532,
862, 864.
1. From Psalm 141.5 as it appears in the Vulgate. “I looked on my right hand,
and beheld, but there was no man that would know me.… no man cared for
my soul” (KJV, Psalm 142.4).
 Locale

NORMAN PAGE
Settings and Sources†
Jude is the most restless of all Hardy’s heroes; and, as the
titles of its six “parts” indicate, the novel is constructed
around his wanderings. From Marygreen he makes his long-
desired journey to Christminster; subsequently he lives in
Melchester, Shaston, Aldbrickham, “and elsewhere”; and he
returns to Christminster to die. All of these correspond to
actual places (see map, pp. 2–3), and all are evoked with a
powerful sense of the physical environment—not, however,
the rural environment of the earlier novels, but (with the
exception of Marygreen) urban settings in which the most
powerful elements are the architectural qualities of their
buildings and the awareness that they have been the
scenes of multitudinous lives in the past.
For some of these settings Hardy drew directly on
personal experience. Marygreen is based on the village of
Great Fawley in Berkshire; Hardy’s paternal grandmother
had lived there as a child, and he visited the spot in October
1892 when he was beginning to plan the novel (see extracts
below from the Life). Hardy also knew “Melchester” well: it
is the cathedral city of Salisbury in Wiltshire, and was
familiar both on account of its architectural attractions and
because his sisters had trained as teachers at the Church of
England college there.
VALTERS’ PLAN OF OXFORD
Issued in 1891 by J. C. Valters. Hardy may have used this
map, or one very much like it, when he explored Oxford in
1893.

The account of “Shaston” (Shaftesbury in Dorset) places

more emphasis on the history of the town than on its
present-day appearance, and for this material Hardy went to
a printed source. The parallel passages given below suggest
the extent of his debt to Hutchins’s county history. But it is
“Christminster” which dominates the novel: its streets and
buildings, colleges and slums, are described with precision
and feeling, down to the very texture of the crumbling
medieval stonework. Hardy visited Oxford in June 1893,
shortly before he began to write the novel “at full length”:
he was a conscientious sightseer, and this was a working
holiday in quest of material for the novel, though his
information seems to be derived from guide-books and
histories as well as from personal impressions. In spite of his
later insistence on the fictitious element in Christminster,
the picture of late-Victorian Oxford is both detailed and
accurate.
Marygreen
‘October. At Great Fawley, Berks. Entered a ploughed vale
which might be called the Valley of Brown Melancholy. The
silence is remarkable.… Though I am alive with the living I
can only see the dead here, and am scarcely conscious of
the happy children at play.’1
[During Hardy’s last visit to Oxford, in June 1923] they
paused also at Fawley, that pleasant Berkshire village
described in [Jude the Obscure] under the name of
Marygreen. Here some of Hardy’s ancestors were buried,
and he searched fruitlessly for their graves in the little
churchyard. His father’s mother, the gentle, kindly
grandmother who lived with the family at Bockhampton
during Hardy’s childhood, had spent the first thirteen years
of her life here as an orphan child, named Mary Head, and
her memories of Fawley were so poignant that she never
cared to return to the place after she had left it as a young
girl. The surname of Jude was taken from this place.2
Christminster
[In June 1893] Hardy was at Oxford. It was during the
Encaenia, with the Christ Church and other college balls,
garden-parties, and suchlike bright functions, but Hardy did
not make himself known, his object being to view the
proceedings entirely as a stranger. * * * He viewed the
Commemoration proceedings from the undergraduates’
gallery of the Sheldonian, his quarters while at Oxford being
at the Wilberforce Temperance Hotel.3
Lord Rosebery took occasion in a conversation to inquire
‘why Hardy had called Oxford “Christminister”.’ Hardy
assured him that he had not done anything of the sort,
‘Christminster’ being a city of learning that was certainly
suggested by Oxford, but in its entirety existed nowhere
else in the world but between the covers of the novel under
discussion. The answer was not so flippant as it seemed, for
Hardy’s idea had been, as he often explained, to use the
difficulty of a poor man’s acquiring learning at that date
merely as the ‘tragic mischief’ (among others) of a dramatic
story, for which purpose an old-fashioned university at the
very door of the poor man was the most striking method;
and though the architecture and scenery of Oxford were the
best in England adapted for this, he did not slavishly copy
them; indeed in some details he departed considerably from
whatever of the city he took as a general model. It is hardly
necessary to add that he had no feeling in the matter, and
used Jude’s difficulties of study as he would have used war,
fire, or shipwreck for bringing about a catastrophe.4
 There is in existence a sheet of notepaper on which, in
Hardy’s own hand, are written most of the place-names in
Jude, and then, after the words approximates to, the real
place-names in a parallel column; part of this list is as
follows:5
Beersheba the purlieu called Jericho.
St. Silas St. Barnabas.
Chief St. High St.
Fourways Carfax.
Meeting place of Jude & Sue Cross in pavement, Broad
St.
Crozier Coll. Oriel?
Old Time Street Oriel Lane?
Rubric Coll. Brazenose.
Cardinal Coll. Christ Church Coll.
The Cathedral Christchurch.
Cardinal Street St. Aldates St.
Ch(urch) with Italian Porch St. Mary’s.
Theatre of Wren Sheldonian.
The octagonal chamber (p. Cupola of Sheldonian.
141)
Oldgate Coll. New Coll.
The riverside path The towing path.6

Melchester
* * * Salisbury, a place in which he was never tired of
sojourning, partly from personal associations and partly
because its graceful cathedral pile was the most marked
instance in England of an architectural intention carried out
to the full.7
At Salisbury they stopped for a little while to look at the
Cathedral, as Hardy always loved doing, and various old
buildings, including the Training College which he had
visited more than fifty years before when his two sisters
were students there, and which is faithfully described in
Jude the Obscure.8
Shaston
Jude the Obscure, part IV, chapter 1, contains an elaborate
description of Shaston. As the following parallel passages
show, Hardy’s source for much of his information was John
Hutchins’s The History and Antiquities of the County of
Dorset, first published in 1774. Hardy used the third edition,
“corrected, augmented, and improved,” issued in four large
volumes in 1861–70; his annotated copy is now in the
Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection in Dorset County
Museum.
(a) [Hardy] Shaston, the ancient British Palladour * * *
[Hutchins] In British it is called Caer Palladur, * * *
The supposed British names Caer Palladur, or
Palledour, seem to be mere invention, alluding to a
temple of Pallas, which some have placed here,
though that deity was unknown to the ancient
Britons. [A footnote adds:] Shaftesbury might by the
Britons have been called Paladur, from the British Pal
a dur, distant from water.
(b) [Hardy] * * * rising on the north, south, and west
sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of
Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over
three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and
Nether Wessex * * * the medicinal air * * * Its
situation rendered water the great want of the town;
and within living memory, horses, donkeys and men
may have been seen toiling up the winding ways to
the top of the height, laden with tubs and barrels
filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and
hawkers retailing their contents at the price of a
halfpenny a bucketful.
 [Hutchins] On the south and west you have a very
extensive prospect over the counties of Dorset,
Somerset, and Wilts * * * The air * * * is pure and
healthy * * * on the north, south, and west, the vale
of Blakemore, a deep country * * * Few places have
been more distressed for water than Shaftesbury,
the situation being so high * * * ‘Naturally it has in it
no water; but round about on the edge of the hill are
pleasant springs, from which the towne’s uses are
supplied, and brought up by hands, or on horses’
backs.’9 * * * A great many people formerly got their
living by carrying water, for which they had three-
halfpence or two-pence a load, according to the part
of the town they carried it to; and a farthing or a
halfpenny a pail, if fetched upon the head.
(c) [Hardy] The bones of King Edward ‘the Martyr,’
carefully removed hither for holy preservation,
brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort
of pilgrims from every part of Europe * * *
[Hutchins] St. Edward the Martyr * * * This
unfortunate king being esteemed a martyr and
canonized a saint, his shrine was much resorted to
by superstitious pilgrims * * *
(d) [Hardy] * * * its magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief
glory of South Wessex * * * its shrines, chantries,
hospitals * * * To this fair creation of the great
Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as historians tell us,
the death-knell.
[Hutchins] [The Abbey was] the glory and ornament
of the town * * * It was a most magnificent building *
* * It seems to have been ruined immediately upon
the Dissolution * * * [Among those buried there are]
King Edward the Martyr; Elfgiva, wife of Edmund,
 King of the West Saxons * * * Cecilia Fovent, abbess;
Joan Formage, abbess * * * the choir and presbytery,
which terminated to the east in a semicircular apse *
* * [Hutchins adds a list of chantries, also “The Priory
or Hospital of St. John Baptist.”]

† Page edited the previous Norton Critical Edition of the novel; all bracketed
words and phrases have been added by him.
1. Hardy’s diary, October 1892, quoted in Life, pp. 250–51.
2. Life, p. 420.
3. Life, p. 257.
4. Life, pp. 278–79.
5. Reproduced in facsimile in Thomas Hardy, by Clive Holland, p. 144 [Rutland’s
note].
6. W. R. Rutland, Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and Their Background
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1938) 246–47.
7. Life, p. 295.
8. Life, p. 420, referring to the 1923 journey.
9. Quoted by Hutchins from a map of 1615.
CRITICISM
 Contemporary Reception

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

From Harper’s Weekly (December 7,
1895)†
The story is a tragedy, and tragedy almost unrelieved by the
humorous touch which the poet is master of. The grotesque
is there abundantly, but not the comic; and at times this
ugliness heightens the pathos to almost intolerable effect.
But I must say that the figure of Jude himself is, in spite of
all his weakness and debasement, one of inviolable dignity.
He is the sport of fate, but he is never otherwise than
sublime; he suffers more for others than for himself. The
wretched Sue who spoils his life and her own, helplessly,
inevitably, is the kind of fool who finds the fool in the poet
and prophet so often, and brings him to naught. She is not
less a fool than Arabella herself; though of such exaltation in
her folly that we cannot refuse her a throe of compassion,
even when she is most perverse. All the characters, indeed,
have the appealing quality of human creatures really doing
what they must while seeming to do what they will. It is not
a question of blaming them or praising them; they are in the
necessity of what they do and what they suffer. One may
indeed blame the author for presenting such a conception of
life; one may say that it is demoralizing if not immoral; but
as to his dealing with his creations in the circumstance
which he has imagined, one can only praise him for his
truth.
The story has to do with some things not hitherto touched
in fiction, or Anglo-Saxon fiction at least; and there cannot
be any doubt of the duty of criticism to warn the reader that
it is not for all readers. But not to affirm the entire purity of
the book in these matters would be to fail of another duty of
which there can be as little doubt. I do not believe any one
can get the slightest harm from any passage of it; only one
would rather that innocence were not acquainted with all
that virtue may know. Vice can feel nothing but self-
abhorrence in the presence of its facts.
The old conventional personifications seem drolly
factitious in their reference to the vital reality of this strange
book. I suppose it can be called morbid, and I do not deny
that it is. But I have not been able to find it untrue, while I
know that the world is full of truth that contradicts it. The
common experience, or perhaps I had better say the
common knowledge of life contradicts it. Commonly, the boy
of Jude’s strong aspiration and steadfast ambition succeeds
and becomes in some measure the sort of man he dreamed
of being. Commonly, a girl like Sue flutters through the
anguish of her harassed and doubting youth and settles into
acquiescence with the ordinary life of women, if not
acceptance of it. Commonly, a boy like the son of Jude,
oppressed from birth with the sense of being neither loved
nor wanted, hardens himself against his misery, fights for
the standing denied him, and achieves it. The average
Arabella has no reversion to her first love when she has
freed herself from it. The average Phillotson does not give
up his wife to the man she says she loves, and he does not
take her back knowing her loathing for himself. I grant all
these things; and yet the author makes me believe that all
he says to the contrary inevitably happened.
I allow that there are many displeasing things in the book,
and few pleasing. Arabella’s dimple-making, the pig-killing,
the boy suicide and homicide; Jude’s drunken second
marriage; Sue’s wilful self-surrender to Phillotson: these and
other incidents are revolting. They make us shiver with
horror and grovel with shame, but we know that they are
deeply founded in the condition, if not in the nature of
humanity. There are besides these abhorrent facts certain
accusations against some accepted formalities of
civilization, which I suppose most readers will find hardly
less shocking. But I think it is very well for us to ask from
time to time the reasons of things, and to satisfy ourselves,
if we can, what the reasons are. If the experience of Jude
with Arabella seems to arraign marriage, and it is made to
appear not only ridiculous but impious that two young,
ignorant, impassioned creatures should promise lifelong
fealty and constancy when they have no real sense of what
they are doing, and that then they should be held to their
rash vow by all the forces of society, it is surely not the
lesson of the story that any other relation than marriage is
tolerable for the man and woman who live together. Rather
it enforces the conviction that marriage is the sole solution
of the question of sex, while it shows how atrocious and
heinous marriage may sometimes be.
I find myself defending the book on the ethical side when
I meant chiefly to praise it for what seems to me its artistic
excellence. It has not only the solemn and lofty effect of a
great tragedy; a work far faultier might impart this; but it
has unity very uncommon in the novel, and especially the
English novel. So far as I can recall its incidents there are
none but such as seem necessary from the circumstances
and the characters. Certain little tricks which the author
sometimes uses to help himself out, and which give the
sense of insincerity or debility, are absent here. He does not
invoke the playful humour which he employs elsewhere.
Such humour as there is tastes bitter, and is grim if not
sardonic. This tragedy of fate suggests the classic
singleness of means as well as the classic singleness of
motive.

† Howells (1837–1920), the American novelist, was a friend of Hardy. He was

active as a literary journalist and magazine editor.

MARGARET OLIPHANT
From Blackwood’s Magazine (January
1896)†
* * *
I do not know, however, for what audience Mr. Hardy intends
his last work, which has been introduced, as he tells us, for
the last twelve months, into a number of decent houses in
England and America, with the most shameful portions
suppressed.1 How they could be suppressed in a book whose
tendency throughout is so shameful I do not understand; but
it is to be hoped that the conductors and readers of Harper’s
Magazine were so protected by ignorance as not to
understand what the writer meant then—though he now
states it with a plainness beyond mistake.

* * *
The present writer does not pretend to a knowledge of the
works of Zola,2 which perhaps she ought to have before
presuming to say that nothing so coarsely indecent as the
whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella
has ever been put in English print—that is to say, from the
hands of a Master. There may be books more disgusting,
more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail,
in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find
garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any
Master’s hand. It is vain to tell us that there are scenes in
Shakespeare himself which, if they were picked out for
special attention, would be offensive to modesty. There is no
need for picking out in the work now referred to. Its faults do
not lie in mere suggestion, or any double entendre, though
these are bad enough. In the history of Jude, the half-
educated and by no means uninteresting hero in whose
early self-training there is much that is admirable—Mr.
Hardy has given us a chapter in what used to be called the
conflict between vice and virtue. The young man, vaguely
aspiring after education, learning, and a position among the
scholars and students of the land, with a piteous ignorance
of the difficulties before him, yet that conviction of being
able to triumph over them, which, as we know, has often in
real life succeeded in doing so—is really an attractive figure
at his outset. He is virtuous by temperament, meaning no
evil; bent upon doing more than well, and elevating himself
to the level which appears to him the highest in life. But he
falls into the hands of a woman so completely animal that it
is at once too little and too much to call her vicious. She is a
human pig, like the beast whom in a horrible scene she and
her husband kill, quite without shame or consciousness of
any occasion for shame, yet not even carried away by her
senses or any overpowering impulse for their gratification,
so much worse than the sow, that it is entirely on a
calculation of profit that she puts forth her revolting spell.
After the man has been subjugated, a process through
which the reader is required to follow him closely (and
Jude’s own views on this subject are remarkable), he is
made for the rest of his life into a puppet flung about
between them by two women—the fleshly animal Arabella
and the fantastic Susan, the one ready to gratify him in
whatever circumstances they may meet, the other holding
him on the tiptoe of expectation, with a pretended reserve
which is almost more indecent still. In this curious dilemma
the unfortunate Jude, who is always the puppet, always
acted upon by the others, never altogether loses our
esteem. He is a very poor creature, but he would have liked
much better to do well if they would have let him, and dies a
virtuous victim of the eternal feminine, scarcely ever
blameable, though always bearing both the misery and the
shame.
We can with difficulty guess what is Mr. Hardy’s motive in
portraying such a struggle. It can scarcely be said to be one
of those attacks upon the institution of Marriage, which is
the undisguised inspiration of some of the other books
before us. It is marriage indeed which in the beginning
works Jude’s woe; and it is by marriage, or rather the
marrying of himself and others, that his end is brought
about. We rather think the author’s object must be, having
glorified women by the creation of Tess, to show after all
what destructive and ruinous creatures they are, in general
circumstances and in every development, whether brutal or
refined. Arabella, the first—the pig-dealer’s daughter, whose
native qualities have been ripened by the experiences of a
barmaid—is the Flesh, unmitigated by any touch of human
feeling except that of merciless calculation as to what will
be profitable for herself. She is the native product of the
fields, the rustic woman, exuberant and overflowing with
health, vanity and appetite. The colloquy between her and
her fellows in their disgusting work, after her first almost
equally disgusting interview with Jude, is one of the most
unutterable foulness—a shame to the language in which it is
recorded and suggested; and the picture altogether of the
country lasses at their outdoor work is more brutal in
depravity than anything which the darkest slums could bring
forth, as are the scenes in which their good advice is carried
out. Is it possible that there are readers in England to whom
this infamy can be palatable, and who, either in
inadvertence or in wantonness, can make it pay? Mr. Hardy
informs us3 he has taken elaborate precautions to secure
the double profit of the serial writer, by subduing his colours
and diminishing his effects, in the presence of the less
corrupt, so as to keep the perfection of filthiness for those
who love it. It would be curious to compare in this
unsavoury traffic how much of the sickening essence of his
story Mr. Hardy has thought his first public could stomach,
and how many edifying details he has put in for the
enlightenment of those who have no squeamish scruples to
get over. The transaction is insulting to the public, with
whom he trades the viler wares under another name, with
all the suppressed passages restored, as old-book dealers
say in their catalogues, recommending their ancient scandal
to the amateurs of the unclean. It is not the first time Mr.
Hardy has adopted this expedient. If the English public
supports him in it, it will be to the shame of every individual
who thus confesses himself to like and accept what the
author himself acknowledges to be unfit for the eyes—not of
girls and young persons only, but of the ordinary reader—
the men and women who read the Magazines, the public
whom we address in these pages. That the prophets should
prophesy falsely is not the most important fact in national
degradation: it is only when the people love to have it so
that the climax is attained.
The other woman—who makes virtue vicious by keeping
the physical facts of one relationship in life in constant
prominence by denying, as Arabella does by satisfying
them, and even more skilfully and insistently than Arabella
—the fantastic raisonneuse,4 Susan, completes the circle of
the unclean. She marries to save herself from trouble; then
quits her husband, to live a life of perpetual temptation and
resistance with her lover; then marries, or professes to
marry him, when her husband amiably divorces her without
the reason he supposes himself to have; and then, when a
selfish conscience is tardily awakened, returns to the
husband, and ends in ostentatious acceptance of the
conditions of matrimony at the moment when the
unfortunate Jude, who has also been recaptured by the
widowed Arabella, dies of his cruel misery. This woman we
are required to accept as the type of high-toned purity. It is
the women who are the active agents in all this unsavoury
imbroglio: the story is carried on, and life is represented as
carried on, entirely by their means. The men are passive,
suffering, rather good than otherwise, victims of these and
of fate. Not only do they never dominate, but they are quite
incapable of holding their own against these remorseless
ministers of destiny, these determined operators, managing
all the machinery of life so as to secure their own way. This
is one of the most curious developments of recent fiction. It
is perhaps natural that it should be more or less the case in
books written by women, to whom the mere facility of
representing their own sex acts as a primary reason for
giving them the chief place in the scene. But it has now still
more markedly, though much less naturally, become the
method with men, in the hands of many of whom women
have returned to the rôle of the temptress given to them by
the old monkish sufferers of ancient times, who fled to the
desert, like Anthony, to get free of them, but even there
barely escaped with their lives from the seductions of the
sirens, who were so audacious as to follow them to the very
scene of the macerations and miseries into which the
unhappy men plunged to escape from their toils. In the
books of the younger men, it is now the woman who
seduces—it is no longer the man.
This, however, is a consideration by the way. I have said
that it is not clear what Mr. Hardy’s motive is in the history
of Jude: but, on reconsideration, it becomes more clear that
it is intended as an assault on the stronghold of marriage,
which is now beleaguered on every side. The motto is, ‘The
letter killeth’; and I presume this must refer to the fact of
Jude’s early and unwilling union to Arabella, and that the
lesson the novelist would have us learn is, that if marriage
were not exacted, and people were free to form connections
as the spirit moves them, none of these complications would
have occurred, and all would have been well. ‘There seemed
to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary the cancelling of well-formed
schemes involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing
a man’s one opportunity of showing himself superior to the
lower animals, and of contributing his units of work to the
general progress of his generation, because of a momentary
surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing
in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most
called weakness.’ This is the hero’s own view of the
circumstances which, in obedience to the code of honour
prevalent in the countryside, compelled his marriage.
Suppose, however, that instead of upsetting the whole
framework of society, Jude had shown himself superior to
the lower animals by not yielding to that new and transitory
influence, the same result could have been easily attained:
and he might then have met and married Susan and lived
happy ever after, without demanding a total overthrow of all
existing laws and customs to prevent him from being
unhappy. Had it been made possible for him to have visited
Arabella as long as the new and transitory influence lasted,
and then to have lived with Susan as long as she pleased to
permit him to do so, which was the best that could happen
were marriage abolished, how would that have altered the
circumstances? When Susan changed her mind would he
have been less unhappy? When Arabella claimed him again
would he have been less weak?
Mr. Hardy’s solution of the great insoluble question of
what is to be the fate of children in such circumstances
brings this nauseous tragedy suddenly and at a stroke into
the regions of pure farce—which is a surprise of the first
quality, only too grotesque to be amusing. There are
children, as a matter of course: a weird little imp, the son of
Arabella, and two babies of Susan’s. What is the point of the
allegory which Mr. Hardy intends us to read in the absurd
little gnome, nicknamed Old Father Time, who is the
offspring of the buxom country lass, is a secondary subject
upon which we have no light: but it is by the means of this
strange creature that the difficulty is settled. In a moment of
dreadful poverty and depression, Susan informs her
stepson, whom she loves and is very kind to, of the severe
straits in which she is. The child—he is now fourteen—asks
whether himself and the others are not a great burden upon
the parents who are already so poor; and she consents that
life would be easier without them. The result is that when
she comes in after a short absence she can find no trace of
the children, until she perceives what seems to be, at first,
suits of their clothes hanging against the wall, but discovers
to be the children themselves, all hanged, and swinging
from the clothes-pegs: the elder boy having first hanged
them and then himself to relieve the parent’s hands. Does
Mr. Hardy think this is really a good way of disposing of the
unfortunate progeny of such connections? does he
recommend it for general adoption? It is at least a clean and
decisive cut of the knot, leaving no ragged ends; but then
there is no natural provision in families of such a wise small
child to get its progenitors out of trouble. * * * Mr. Hardy
knows, no doubt as everybody does, that the children are a
most serious part of the question of the abolition of
marriage. Is this the way in which he considers it would be
resolved best?

† Mrs. Margaret Oliphant was a prolific novelist and reviewer. Her attack on
Hardy’s novel appears in an article titled “The Anti-Marriage League,” which
also discusses Grant Allen’s controversial novel The Woman Who Did (1895).
For Hardy’s views on Mrs. Oliphant, see Norman Page, “Hardy, Mrs. Oliphant,
and Jude the Obscure,” Victorian Newsletter 46 (1974): 22–24. All notes are
by the editor of the previous Norton Critical Edition.
1. The reference is to the serialization of the novel in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine.
2. Emile Zola (1840–1902), French novelist, was widely attacked by English
critics and moralists for the alleged immorality of his realistic fictions. The
publisher Henry Vizetelly had been successfully prosecuted in 1888 for
issuing translations of some of Zola’s novels.
3. The reference seems to be to the second paragraph of Hardy’s “Preface to
the First Edition.”
4. Woman who reasons or argues.

EDMUND GOSSE
From Cosmopolis (January 1896)†
* * *
In Jude the Obscure, [Hardy] has aimed, in all probability,
higher than he ever aimed before, and it is not to be
maintained that he has been equally successful in every
part of his design.
Before these pages find a reader, everybody will be
familiar with Jude the Obscure, and we may well be
excused, therefore, from repeating the story in detail. It will
be remembered that it is a study of four lives, a rectangular
problem in failures, drawn with almost mathematical rigidity.
The tragedy of these four persons is constructed in a mode
almost as geometrical as that in which Dr. Samuel Clarke1
was wont to prove the existence of the Deity. It is difficult
not to believe that the author set up his four ninepins in the
wilds of Wessex, and built up his theorem round them. Here
is an initial difficulty. Not quite thus is theology or poetry
conveniently composed; we like to conceive that the relation
of the parts was more spontaneous, we like to feel that the
persons of a story have been thrown up in a jet of
enthusiasm, not put into a cave of theory to be slowly
covered with stalactite. In this I may be doing Mr. Hardy an
injustice, but a certain hardness in the initial conception of
Jude the Obscure cannot, I believe, be denied. Mr. Hardy is
certainly to be condoled with upon the fact that his novel,
which has been seven years in the making, has appeared at
last at a moment when a sheaf of ‘purpose’ stories on the
‘marriage question’ (as it is called) have just been irritating
the nerves of the British Patron. No serious critic, however,
will accuse Mr. Hardy of joining the ranks of these deciduous
troublers of our peace.
We come, therefore, without prejudice to his chronicle of
four unnecessary lives. There are the poor village lad, with
his longing for the intellectual career; the crude village
beauty, like a dahlia in a cottage-garden; the neurotic, semi-
educated girl of hyper-sensitive instincts; and the dull,
earthy, but not ungenerous schoolmaster. On these four
failures, inextricably tied together and dragging one another
down, our attention is riveted—on Jude, Arabella, Sue and
Phillotson. Before, however, we discuss their characteristics,
we may give a little attention to the scene in which these
are laid. Mr. Hardy, as all the world knows, has dedicated his
life’s work to the study of the old province of Wessex. * * *
That he is never happy outside its borders is a
commonplace; it is not quite so clearly perceived, perhaps,
that he is happiest in the heart of it. When Mr. Hardy writes
of South Wessex (Dorsetshire) he seldom goes wrong; this
country has been the theatre for all his most splendid
successes. From Abbot’s Cornal to Budmouth Regis, and
wherever the wind blows freshly off Egdon Heath, he is
absolute master and king. But he is not content with such a
limited realm; he claims four other counties, and it must be
confessed that his authority weakens as he approaches their
confines.
Jude the Obscure is acted in North Wessex (Berkshire) and
just across the frontier, at Christminster (Oxford), which is
not in Wessex at all. We want our novelist back among the
rich orchards of the Hintocks, and where the water-lilies
impede the lingering river at Shottsford Ash. Berkshire is an
unpoetical county, ‘meanly utilitarian’, as Mr. Hardy
confesses; the imagination hates its concave, loamy
cornfields and dreary, hedgeless highways. The local history
has been singularly tampered with in Berkshire; it is useless
to speak to us of ancient records where the past is all
obliterated, and the thatched and dormered houses
replaced by modern cottages. In choosing North Wessex as
the scene of a novel Mr. Hardy wilfully deprives himself of a
great element of his strength. Where there are no
prehistoric monuments, no ancient buildings, no mossed
and immemorial woodlands, he is Samson shorn. In
Berkshire, the change which is coming over England so
rapidly, the resignation of the old dreamy elements of
beauty, has proceeded further than anywhere else in
Wessex. Pastoral loveliness is to be discovered only here
and there, while in Dorsetshire it still remains the master-
element. All this combines to lessen the physical charm of
Jude the Obscure to those who turn from it in memory to Far
from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native.
But, this fortuitous absence of beauty being
acknowledged, the novelist’s hand shows no falling off in
the vigour and reality of his description. It may be held, in
fact, to be a lesser feat to raise before us an enchanting
vision of the valley of the Froom, than successfully to rivet
our attention on the prosaic arable land encircling the dull
hamlet of Marygreen. Most attractive Mr. Hardy’s pictures of
purely country life have certainly been—there is no picture
in Jude to approach that of the life on the dairy farm in Tess
—but he has never treated rural scenes with a more
prodigious mastery and knowledge. It is, in fact, in
knowledge, that Mr. Hardy’s work of this class is so
admirable. Mere observation will not produce this illusion of
absolute truth. * * * we are never more happy than when he
allows us to overhear the primitive Wessex speech. Our only
quarrel with Mr. Hardy, indeed, in this respect, is that he
grows now impatient of retailing to us the axiomatic
humour, the crafty and narrow dignity of the villager.
 To pass from the landscape to the persons, two threads of
action seem to be intertwined in Jude the Obscure. We have,
first of all, the contrast between the ideal life the young
peasant of scholarly instincts wished to lead, and the
squalid real life into which he was fated to sink. We have,
secondly, the almost rectilinear puzzle of the sexual
relations of the four principal characters. Mr. Hardy has
wished to show how cruel destiny can be to the eternal
dream of youth, and he has undertaken to trace the
lamentable results of unions in a family exhausted by
intermarriage and poverty. Some collision is apparent
between these aims; the first seems to demand a poet, the
second a physician. The Fawleys are a decayed and wasted
race, in the last of whom, Jude, there appears, with a kind of
flicker in the socket, a certain intellectual and artistic
brightness. In favourable surroundings, we feel that this
young man might have become fairly distinguished as a
scholar, or as a sculptor. But at the supreme moment, or at
each supreme moment, the conditions hurl him back into
insignificance. When we examine clearly what these
conditions are, we find them to be instinctive. He is just
going to develop into a lad of education, when Arabella
throws her hideous missile at him, and he sinks with her into
a resigned inferiority.
So far, the critical court is with Mr. Hardy; these scenes
and their results give a perfect impression of truth. Later on,
it is not quite evident whether the claim on Jude’s passions,
or the inherent weakness of his inherited character, is the
source of his failure. Perhaps both. But it is difficult to see
what part Oxford has in his destruction, or how Mr. Hardy
can excuse the rhetorical diatribes against the university
which appear towards the close of the book. Does the
novelist really think that it was the duty of the heads of
houses to whom Jude wrote his crudely pathetic letters to
offer him immediately a fellowship? We may admit to the
full the pathos of Jude’s position—nothing is more heart-
rending than the obscurity of the half-educated—but surely,
the fault did not lie with Oxford.
The scene at Commemoration (Part VI) is of a marvellous
truth and vividness of presentment, but it would be
stronger, and even more tragic, if Mr. Hardy did not appear
in it as an advocate taking sides with his unhappy hero. In
this portion of his work, it seems to me, Mr. Hardy had but to
paint—as clearly and as truthfully as he could—the hopes,
the struggles, the disappointments of Jude, and of these he
has woven a tissue of sombre colouring, indeed, and even of
harsh threads, but a tapestry worthy of a great imaginative
writer. It was straightforward poet’s work in invention and
observation, and he has executed it well.
But in considering the quadruple fate of the four leading
characters, of whom Jude is but one, we come to matter of a
different order. Here the physician, the neuropathist, steps
in, and takes the pen out of the poet’s hand. Let us for a
moment strip to its barest nomination this part of the plot.
Jude, a neurotic subject in whom hereditary degeneracy
takes an idealist turn, with some touch, perhaps, of what the
new doctors call megalomania, has been warned by the
local gossips not to marry. But he is physically powerful and
attractive, and he engages the notice of Arabella, a young
woman of gross instincts and fine appearance, who seduces
and marries him. He falls from his scholastic dream to the
level of a labourer, and is only saved by the fact that
Arabella wearies of him and leaves him. He goes to Oxford,
and, gradually cultivating the dream again, seems on the
first rung of the ladder of success, when he comes across
his own cousin Sue, and loves her. But she has promised to
marry Phillotson, a weary middle-aged schoolmaster, and
marry him she will, although she loves Jude, and has forced
him to compromise her. But she finds Phillotson intolerable,
and leaves him to join Jude, only to find herself equally
unhappy and unsatisfying, dragging Jude once more down to
mediocrity. Arabella crosses Jude’s life again, and jealousy
forces Sue to some semblance of love for Jude. Sue
becomes the mother of several children, who are killed in a
fit of infantile mania by a boy, the son of Jude and Arabella,
whose habitual melancholy, combined with his hereditary
antecedents, has prepared us for an outbreak of suicide, if
not of murder. This horrible event affects Sue by producing
religious mania. She will live no longer with Jude, although
both couples have got their divorce, but fatally returns to be
the slave of her detested schoolmaster, while Jude, in a
paroxysm of drunken abandonment, goes back to Arabella
and dies.
It is a ghastly story, especially when reduced to this
naked skeleton. But it does not appear to me that we have
any business to call in question the right of a novelist of Mr.
Hardy’s extreme distinction to treat what themes he will. We
may wish—and I for my part cordially wish—that more
pleasing, more charming plots than this could take his fancy.
But I do not feel at liberty to challenge his discretion. One
thing, however, the critic of comparative literature must
note. We have, in such a book as Jude the Obscure, traced
the full circle of propriety. A hundred and fifty years ago,
Fielding and Smollett brought up before us pictures, used
expressions, described conduct, which appeared to their
immediate successors a little more crude than general
reading warranted. In Miss Burney’s hands and in Miss
Austen’s, the morals were still further hedged about. Scott
was even more daintily reserved. We came at last to
Dickens, where the clamorous passions of mankind, the
coarser accidents of life, were absolutely ignored, and the
whole question of population seemed reduced to the theory
of the gooseberry bush. This was the ne plus ultra of
decency; Thackeray and George Eliot relaxed this intensity
of prudishness; once on the turn, the tide flowed rapidly,
and here is Mr. Hardy ready to say any mortal thing that
Fielding said, and a good deal more too.
 So much we note, but to censure it, if it calls for censure,
is the duty of the moralist and not the critic. Criticism asks
how the thing is done, whether the execution is fine and
convincing. To tell so squalid and so abnormal a story in an
interesting way is in itself a feat, and this, it must be
universally admitted, Mr. Hardy has achieved. Jude the
Obscure is an irresistible book; it is one of those novels into
which we descend and are carried on by a steady impetus to
the close, when we return, dazzled, to the light of common
day. The two women, in particular, are surely created by a
master. Every impulse, every speech, which reveals to us
the coarse and animal, but not hateful Arabella, adds to the
solidity of her portrait. We may dislike her, we may hold her
intrusion into our consciousness a disagreeable one, but of
her reality there can be no question: Arabella lives.
It is conceivable that not so generally will it be admitted
that Sue Bridehead is convincing. Arabella is the excess of
vulgar normality; every public bar and village fair knows
Arabella, but Sue is a strange and unwelcome product of
exhaustion. The vita sexualis2 of Sue is the central interest
of the book, and enough is told about it to fill the specimen
tables of a German specialist. Fewer testimonies will be
given to her reality than to Arabella’s because hers is much
the rarer case. But her picture is not less admirably drawn;
Mr. Hardy has, perhaps, never devoted so much care to the
portrait of a woman. She is a poor, maimed ‘degenerate’,
ignorant of herself and of the perversion of her instincts, full
of febrile, amiable illusions, ready to dramatize her empty
life, and play at loving though she cannot love. Her
adventure with the undergraduate has not taught her what
she is; she quits Phillotson still ignorant of the source of her
repulsion; she lives with Jude, after a long, agonizing
struggle, in a relation that she accepts with distaste, and
when the tragedy comes, and her children are killed, her
poor extravagant brain slips one grade further down, and
she sees in this calamity the chastisement of God. What has
she done to be chastised? She does not know, but supposes
it must be her abandonment of Phillotson, to whom, in a
spasm of self-abasement, and shuddering with repulsion,
she returns without a thought for the misery of Jude. It is a
terrible study in pathology, but of the splendid success of it,
of the sustained intellectual force implied in the evolution of
it, there cannot, I think, be two opinions.
One word must be added about the speech of the author
and of the characters in Jude the Obscure. Is it too late to
urge Mr. Hardy to struggle against the jarring note of
rebellion which seems growing upon him? It sounded in
Tess, and here it is, more roughly expressed, further
acerbated. What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he
should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his
fist at his Creator? He should not force his talent, should not
give way to these chimerical outbursts of philosophy falsely
so called. His early romances were full of calm and lovely
pantheism; he seemed in them to feel the deep-hued
country landscapes full of rural gods, all homely and benign.
We wish he would go back to Egdon Heath and listen to the
singing in the heather. And as to the conversations of his
semi-educated characters, they are really terrible. Sue and
Jude talk a sort of University Extension jargon that breaks
the heart. ‘The mediaevalism of Christminster must go, be
sloughed off, or Christminster will have to go’, says Sue, as
she sits in a pair of Jude’s trousers, while Jude dries her
petticoat at his garret-fire. Hoity-toity, for a minx! the reader
cries, or, rather, although he firmly believes in the existence
of Sue, and in the truth of the episode, he is convinced that
Mr. Hardy is mistaken in what he heard her say. She could
not have talked like that.

† On Gosse, see p. 351. Hardy’s letters to Gosse, mentioning this review, are
reprinted on pp. 351–53. All notes are by the editor of the previous Norton
Critical Edition.
1. Metaphysician and moralist, author of “A Demonstration of the Being and
Attributes of God” (1704).
2. Sex life.

D. F. HANNIGAN
From Westminster Review (January
1896)†
* * * The history of Jude’s ineffectual efforts to obtain a
University education is intensely pathetic. If Samuel Johnson
could come back to earth and read this portion of Mr.
Hardy’s last novel, I venture to think that he would have
found it hard to keep back his tears, stern Briton though he
was; and, but for the miserable priggery of this tail-end of
the nineteenth century, the first part of Jude the Obscure
would be held up by the critics as one of the most touching
records in all literature. This story of crushed aspirations can
only be appreciated by those who have the power of true
sympathy. Unfortunately, we live in an age when nearly all
human beings are concerned only with their material
success in life. The word ‘failure’ makes them tremble; and,
no doubt, Mr. Hardy’s apparent pessimism is distasteful to
the innumerable throng of vulgar-minded aspirants whose
only gospel is to ‘get on’ by hook or by crook. How could we
expect the modern young man, whose thoughts are fixed
solely on the Woolsack or on the results of a successful
experiment on the Turf or the Stock Exchange, to enter into
the feelings of a poor rustic stone-cutter who dreamed of
taking out his degree and becoming a clergyman! The love-
affairs of so obscure an individual may excite the attention
of the unambitious middle-aged man, but not of the youthful
prig of our day. The relations between Sue and her cousin
will necessarily appear impure to those who see nothing but
uncleanness in the relations of a married man and a woman
who is not his wife. But Mr. Hardy is not to blame for the
brutishness of some of his readers’ minds any more than
Miranda (to borrow a favourite illustration of Mr. Ruskin) is to
blame for Caliban’s beastly thoughts about her.
The ‘plot’ (hideous word!) of Jude the Obscure has been
sketched, and, indeed, misrepresented, by so many of the
smug journalistic critics of this book, that it is better to let
all intelligent and honest readers find out the true history of
Jude Fawley for themselves by reading the novel. It is
certainly ‘strong meat’, but there is nothing prurient,
nothing artificial in this work; it is human in the widest sense
of that comprehensive word. The tragic chapter with which
the novel closes is perhaps the finest specimen of pure
narrative that Mr. Hardy has ever given us—there is nothing
equal to it in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The character of Sue
is nearly as fascinating as that of Elfride in A Pair of Blue
Eyes. In concentrated power the novel, as a whole, is
inferior to Tess, and it lacks the fresh, sweet atmosphere
which makes The Woodlanders one of the most delightful of
books. In Arabella we have a faithful portrait of a foul-
minded woman whom we can compare to no other female
personage in Mr. Hardy’s novels. Some of the language put
into the mouth of Phillotson, the husband of Sue, is a little
incongruous, for it is scarcely likely that a village
schoolmaster would talk about ‘the matriarchal system’.
But in spite of certain defects of form which are perhaps
inevitable, having regard to the intricacies of a story
involving matrimonial complications, Jude the Obscure is the
best English novel which has appeared since Tess of the
D’Urbervilles. Mr. George Meredith’s epigrammatic
cleverness cannot atone for his poverty of invention, his lack
of incident, his fantastic system of misreading human
nature, and, if the word ‘novelist’ means a writer of human
history, Mr. Hardy is incomparably superior to his supposed
rival. I would class the author of Tess with Fielding, Balzac,
Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot and Dostoievsky; while Mr.
Meredith is the literary brother of Bulwer Lytton, Peacock
and Mérimée. The mosquito-like criticism of the day need
not trouble a novelist who has already won fame. He is the
greatest living English writer of fiction. In intensity, in grip of
life, and, above all, in the artistic combination of the real
and the ideal, he surpasses any of his French
contemporaries. Jude the Obscure is not his greatest work;
but no other living novelist could have written it.

† Denis F. Hannigan was a reviewer and the translator of several French novels.

W. W. HOW, BISHOP OF WAKEFIELD

Letter to the Yorkshire Post (June 9,
1896)†
Sir,
Will you allow me publicly to thank you for your
outspoken leader in your to-day’s issue denouncing the
intolerable grossness and hateful sneering at all that
one most reveres in such writers as Thomas Hardy?
On the authority of one of those reviews which you
justly condemn for their reticence, I bought a copy of
one of Mr. Hardy’s novels, but was so disgusted with its
insolence and indecency that I threw it into the fire. It is
a disgrace to our great public libraries to admit such
garbage, clever though it may be, to their shelves.
I am, Sir
Yours, etc.
William Walsham Wakefield

† On June 8, 1896, the Yorkshire Post, a daily newspaper widely read in the
north of England, published a leading article denouncing Hardy’s work in
general and Jude the Obscure in particular. The following day it published this
 letter from W. W. How, Bishop of Wakefield; for Hardy’s account of it, see
here.

HAVELOCK ELLIS
From Savoy Magazine (October 1896)†
* * *
To sum up, Jude the Obscure seems to me—in such a matter
one can only give one’s own impressions for what they are
worth—a singularly fine piece of art, when we remember the
present position of the English novel. It is the natural
outcome of Mr. Hardy’s development, along lines that are
genuinely and completely English. It deals very subtly and
sensitively with new and modern aspects of life, and if, in so
doing, it may be said to represent Nature as often cruel to
our social laws, we must remark that the strife of Nature
and Society, the individual and the community, has ever
been the artist’s opportunity. ‘Matrimony have growed to be
that serious in these days’, Widow Edlin remarks, ‘that one
really do feel afeard to move in it at all.’ It is an affectation
to pretend that the farmyard theory of life still rules
unquestioned, and that there are no facts to justify Mrs.
Edlin. If anyone will not hear her, let him turn to the
Registrar-General. Such facts are in our civilization today.
We have no right to resent the grave and serious spirit with
which Mr. Hardy, in the maturity of his genius, has devoted
his best art to picture some of these facts. In Jude the
Obscure we find for the first time in our literature the reality
of marriage clearly recognized as something wholly apart
from the mere ceremony with which our novelists have
usually identified it. Others among our novelists may have
tried to deal with the reality rather than with its shadow, but
assuredly not with the audacity, purity and sincerity of an
artist who is akin in spirit to the great artists of our best
dramatic age, to Fletcher and Heywood and Ford, rather
than to the powerful though often clumsy novelists of the
eighteenth century.
There is one other complaint often brought against this
book, I understand, by critics usually regarded as intelligent,
and with the mention of it I have done. ‘Mr. Hardy finds that
marriage often leads to tragedy,’ they say, ‘but he shows us
no way out of these difficulties; he does not tell us his own
plans for the improvement of marriage and the promotion of
morality.’ Let us try to consider this complaint with due
solemnity. It is true that the artist is god in his own world;
but being so he has too fine a sense of the etiquette of
creation to presume to offer suggestions to the creator of
the actual world, suggestions which might be resented, and
would almost certainly not be adopted. An artist’s private
opinions concerning the things that are good and bad in the
larger world are sufficiently implicit in the structure of his
own smaller world; the counsel that he should make them
explicit in a code or rules and regulations for humanity at
large is a counsel which, as every artist knows, can only
come from the Evil One. This complaint against Jude the
Obscure could not have arisen save among a generation
which has battened on moral and immoral tracts thrown into
the form of fiction by ingenious novices.

† Ellis (1859–1939) was both a scientist and a literary scholar and critic. The
publication of the first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex in 1897
led to a prosecution for obscenity. The text extracted here forms the
concluding section of a long essay, “Concerning Jude the Obscure.”

D. H. LAWRENCE
[Male and Female]†
* * *
One of the supremest products of our civilisation is Sue, and
a product that well frightens us. It is quite natural, that with
all her mental alertness, she married Phillotson without ever
considering the physical quality of marriage. Deep instinct
made her avoid the consideration. And the duality of her
nature made her extremely liable to self-destruction. The
suppressed, atrophied female in her, like a potent fury, was
always there, suggesting her to make the fatal mistake. She
contained always the rarest, most deadly anarchy in her
own being.
It needed that she should have some place in society
where the clarity of her mental being, which was in itself a
form of death, could shine out without attracting any desire
for her body. She needed a refinement on Angel Clare. For
she herself was a more specialised, more highly civilised
product on the female side, than Angel Clare on the male.
Yet the atrophied female in her would still want the bodily
male.
She attracted to herself Jude. His experience with Arabella
had for the time being diverted his attention altogether from
the female. His attitude was that of service to the pure male
spirit. But the physical male in him, that which knew and
belonged to the female, was potent, and roused the female
in Sue as much as she wanted it rousing, so much that it
was a stimulant to her, making her mind the brighter.
It was a cruelly difficult position. She must, by the
constitution of her nature, remain quite physically intact, for
the female was atrophied in her, to the enlargement of the
male activity. Yet she wanted some quickening for this
atrophied female. She wanted even kisses. That the new
rousing might give her a sense of life. But she could only
live in the mind.
Then, where could she find a man who would be able to
feed her with his male vitality, through kisses, proximity,
without demanding the female return. For she was such that
she could only receive quickening from a strong male, for
she was herself no small thing. Could she then find a man, a
strong, passionate male, who would devote himself entirely
to the production of the mind in her, to the production of
male activity, or of female activity critical to the male.
She could only receive the highest stimulus, which she
must inevitably seek, from a man who put her in constant
jeopardy. Her essentiality rested upon her remaining intact.
Any suggestion of the physical was utter confusion to her.
Her principle was the ultra-Christian principle—of living
entirely according to the Spirit, to the One, male spirit,
which knows, and utters, and shines, but exists beyond
feeling, beyond joy or sorrow, or pain, exists only in
Knowing. In tune with this, she was herself. Let her,
however, be turned under the influence of the other dark,
silent, strong principle, of the female, and she would break
like a fine instrument under discord.
Yet, to live at all in tune with the male spirit, she must
receive the male stimulus from a man. Otherwise she was
as an instrument without a player. She must feel the hands
of a man upon her, she must be infused with his male
vitality, or she was not alive.
Here then was her difficulty: to find a man whose vitality
could infuse her and make her live, and who would not, at
the same time, demand of her a return, the return of the
female impulse into him. What man could receive this
drainage, receiving nothing back again. He must either die,
or revolt.
One man had died. She knew it well enough, She knew
her own fatality. She knew she drained the vital, male
stimulus out of a man, producing in him only knowledge of
the mind, only mental clarity: which man must always strive
to attain, but which is not life in him, rather the product of
life.
Just as Alec d’Urberville, on the other hand, drained the
female vitality out of a woman, and gave her only sensation,
only experience in the senses, a sense of herself, nothing to
the soul or spirit, thereby exhausting her.

† From The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: “Study of

Thomas Hardy” and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), pp. 109–11. Copyright © 1936 by Frieda Lawrence;
copyright renewed © 1964 by The Estate of the late Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and by Pollinger Limited.
 Modern Criticism

MARY JACOBUS
From Sue the Obscure†
* * *
The death of the children is the most flagrant instance of
Hardy’s preparedness to sacrifice verisimilitude to his
diagrammatic design, but we are never allowed to forget
that Jude is a novel of contrasting ideas. The culminating
and most crucial of them is that between Sue’s unbalance
and Jude’s disillusion. Throughout the book, however, the
rigid ironies of Hardy’s scheme have been translated into
the changing consciousness of his characters. Hence the
unexpected effect of a novel at once fixed and fluid,
overemphatic and true to life. Events which seem contrived
precipitate inner changes which are painfully authenticated.
The peculiar modernity of Jude lies in the weight it gives to
such changes. The sturdy Wessex world of Hardy’s earlier
novels has been ousted by ‘the ache of modernism’;1 no
longer sustained by an enduring rural context, Sue and Jude
have nothing to fall back on but their ideas, and one by one
these fail them. Jude’s mental education reveals the
limitations of Christminster and evangelical Christianity.
Sue’s education—her experience as a woman—brings her
from clarity to compromise, from compromise to collapse.
The birdlike, white-clothed figure at the Great Wessex
Agricultural Show becomes a heap of black garments
sobbing and abasing herself beneath the cross in the Church
of St. Silas of Ceremonies. Arnold’s Christminster, for all its
sweetness and light, gives Jude only his bitter sense of
exclusion: Newman’s Christminster—its Victorian
complement—gives Sue her sense of guilt. She begins with
Hellenic intellect as her light, and ends with Hebraic
conscience as her yoke. Jude (increasingly the recording
consciousness of the novel) underlines the tragic reversal of
their positions:
‘she was once a woman whose intellect was to mine
like a star to a benzoline lamp: who saw all my
superstitions as cobwebs that she could brush away
with a word. Then bitter affliction came to us, and her
intellect broke, and she veered round to darkness.
Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance,
which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views
of women almost invariably.’ (p. 484) [325]
It is precisely Sue’s femaleness which breaks her. When she
loses her unborn child—her last stake in the future—we can
only find Lawrence’s psychic interpretation appallingly
inappropriate: ‘She was no woman. And her children, the
proof thereof, vanished like hoarfrost from her’ (Phoenix, p.
507).
Sue’s self-mortification after the death of her children (‘
“We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of
Adam!” ’, p. 416 [279]) is psychologically plausible; we
recall the self-punishing impulse hinted at earlier in her pre-
enactment with Jude of the wedding ceremony which will
bind her to Phillotson. But it is to easy to write off her return
to Phillotson as a morbid recurrence of this ‘emotional
epicureanism’, the ‘colossal inconsistency’, noted by Jude
years before. The tragic implications of her return emerge
from Hardy’s insistence that Sue is both the same person
and significantly different. The woman who remarries
Phillotson is not the girl who had married him long before:
She had never in her life looked so much like the lily
her name connoted as she did in that pallid morning
light. Chastened, world-weary, remorseful, the strain on
her nerves had preyed upon her flesh and bones, and
she appeared smaller in outline than she had formerly
done, though Sue had not been a large woman in her
days of rudest health. (p. 445) [299]
The oblique reminder of Sue’s sprite-like insubstantiality
gives pitying perspective to this second wedding; the
burden has been too heavy, the bearer too frail. But it is not
just that Sue is worn out by suffering. A younger Sue had
denied her sexuality in ignorance: the older Sue does so
knowingly. As we see from her reunion with Jude, three
months later, she does still love him as passionately and
physically as she is able. When Jude upbraids her (‘ “Sue,
Sue, you are not worth a man’s love!” ’) she bursts out:
‘I can’t endure you to say that! … Don’t, don’t scorn
me! Kiss me, O kiss me lots of times, and say I am not
a coward and a contemptible humbug—I can’t bear it!’
She rushed up to him and, with her mouth on his,
continued: ‘I must tell you—O I must—my darling Love!
It has been—only a church marriage—an apparent
marriage I mean!’ (pp. 470–1) [317]
Afterwards, she confesses to Widow Edlin: ‘ “I find I still love
him—O, grossly” ’ (p. 476) [320]—applying to herself the
word she had once used disapprovingly of Jude. But ‘ “I’ve
got over myself now” ’ she tells him, reminded of their dead
children.
 * * *
Sue’s break-down accentuates Jude’s strength and his
fidelity to the values which originally inspired their struggle.
As she blinds and shackles herself, he grows ever more
clear-sighted. Though she is enslaved in body, and he
enslaved by his own, he at least retains his intellectual
freedom, railing against the state of things to the end. This
contrast means that the complaint that Jude the Obscure is
not fully tragic—that its hero remains a muddler, a man
dragged down by his own weakness—is unjustified. Her
submission to doctrine may be paralleled by his drunken re-
marriage to Arabella (gin-drunk as she is creed-drunk); but
as his body grows weaker, his mind grows stronger. What
Sue betrays, he cleaves to. In the painful scene in which she
abjures their sexual relationship, Jude is spokesman for a
humane code which she is unable to sustain. Jude’s
anguished accusation, ‘ “You have never loved me as I love
you—never—never!” ’ is no more than the truth, and there
is poetic justice when he turns back on Sue the Shelleyan
tribute she had once forced him to make: ‘ “You are, upon
the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite—not a woman!” ’ (p. 426)
[286]. Jude’s plea, ‘ “Stay with me for humanity’s sake” ’,
seeks to transcend differences of sex and creed, binding
them together in their common humanity. His symbolic
action is the more moving because his belief in the
sacredness of their bond remains: ‘ “Then let the veil of our
temple be rent in two from this hour!”. He went to the bed,
removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and flung it to
the floor’ (pp. 427–8) [287]. When he goes to see Sue for
the last time, he reproaches her with ‘ “I would have died
game!” ’ (p. 470) [316], and the reproach signals his tragic
determination to remain true to his values even in death.
His last, suicidal visit to Sue springs from a consciously
undertaken resolution. He tells the scornful and incredulous
Arabella:
 ‘You think you are the stronger; and so you are, in a
physical sense, now.… But I am not so weak in another
way as you think. I made up my mind that a man
confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a
fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see
a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly
accomplish those two wishes at one stroke, by taking
this journey in the rain. That I’ve done. I have seen her
for the last time, and I’ve finished myself—put an end
to a feverish life which ought never to have been
begun!’ (p. 473) [318]
‘ “I meant to do for myself” ’, he asserts, and he succeeds.
Like Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude wills
himself out of existence; his act of self-obliteration is also
self-affirming because he heroically refuses to betray what
he believes—Samson-like, not only in his weakness for
women, but in his final strength of purpose. However bitter,
however despairing, he does die game, and Sue remains
unforgiven.
But the last word in the novel goes to Sue, as Arabella
and Widow Edlin talk beside Jude’s open coffin to the sound
of another Remembrance Day celebration:
‘Did he forgive her?’ [asks Widow Edlin]
‘Not as I know.’
‘Well—poor little thing, ’tis to be believed she’s found
forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found
peace!’
‘She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross
upon her necklace till she’s hoarse, but it won’t be
true!’ said Arabella. ‘She’s never found peace since she
left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is
now!’ (pp. 493–4) [332]
In the end, Sue’s tormented consciousness haunts us more
than Jude’s bitter oblivion. What her life with Phillotson can
be we are left to imagine—‘ “Quite a staid, worn woman
now. ’Tis the man—she can’t stomach un, even now!” ’ (p.
493) [332], reports Widow Edlin—but it is clearly a living
death. Arabella, with the crude insight which characterizes
her throughout, offers Phillotson her own cynical view of the
Mosaic law under which Sue suffers: ‘There’s nothing like
bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women.
Besides, you’ve got the laws on your side. Moses knew …
“Then shall the man be guiltless, but the woman shall bear
her iniquity.” ’ (p. 384) [259]

* * *
Hardy’s intention in Jude may be incompletely realized, but
the novel is not less suggestive, and its protest not less
eloquent, for that.

† From Mary Jacobus, “Sue the Obscure,” Essays in Criticism 25.3 (July 1975):
320–22, 323–25, 327. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Page numbers in square brackets refer to the print version of this Norton
Critical Edition.
1. See the persuasive account of Hardy’s intellectual preoccupations in the later
novels by David de Laura, ‘ “The Ache of Modernism” in Hardy’s Later
Novels’, JELH 34 (1967), 380–99.

PENNY BOUMELHA
[A “Double Tragedy”]†
Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s final double tragedy. In his
previous versions of the double tragedy of a man and of a
woman, the woman’s tragedy has resulted from her sexual
nature, while the man’s has been more involved with
intellectual ideals and ideological pressures. There has been
a polarity of nature and culture which has meant that the
protagonists have rivalled one another for the centre of the
novel, pulling it in different directions and making it hard for
him to use marital or sexual relationship as the crucial point
of the divergence. In Jude, however, Hardy gives for the first
time an intellectual component to the tragedy of the woman
—Sue’s breakdown from an original, incisive intellect to the
compulsive reiteration of the principles of conduct of a mid-
Victorian marriage manual—and, to the man’s, a sexual
component which resides not in simple mismatching, but in
the very fact of his sexuality. There is no sense that Jude and
Sue inhabit different ideological structures as there is in the
cases of Clym and Eustacia, or even Angel and Tess. Indeed,
for all the emphasis on the ‘enigma’ of Sue’s logic and
motivation, there is an equal stress—and this is something
new in Hardy—on her similarity to Jude. The fact of their
cousinship, besides contravening the exogamy rule and so
adding an incestuous frisson to their sense of an impending
and hereditary doom, serves to highlight their similarities;1
there are episodes which quite openly draw attention to
this, either by careful counterpointing of plot (Jude, in his
distress, spending the night at Sue’s lodging, balanced by
Sue, in hers, spending a night in Jude’s room) or by means
of images such as that of Sue’s appearance in Jude’s clothes
as a kind of double. Again, the discussion between the two
after Jude’s impulsive visit to the hymn-writer turned wine-
merchant points up their own sense of sameness between
them; and Phillotson justifies his action in letting Sue go
partly in terms of ‘ “the extraordinary sympathy, or
similarity, between the pair. He is her cousin, which perhaps
accounts for some of it. They seem to be one person split in
two!” (p. 245) [188]. Their lives follow a very similar course.
Both make a mistaken marriage as a result of sexual
vulnerability, as is evident in an interesting ms. revision:
when Jude, on his first outing with Arabella, visits an inn, he
sees on the wall a painting of Samson and Delilah, a clear
symbol of his male sexuality under threat; but the picture
had originally been a painting of Susannah and the Elders, a
symbol of female sexuality under threat, which corresponds
very closely to the roles of Sue and Phillotson. Both Sue and
Jude escape these first marriages, become parents, lose
their jobs, their children, and their lover. Yet Sue is
destroyed, while Jude is even at the end able to talk of dying
‘ “game” ’ (p. 394) [316]. Jude offers explanations for this
phenomenon—‘The blow of her bereavement seemed to
have destroyed her reasoning faculty’ (p. 368) [293]—and
raises questions about it—‘ “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?”
’ (p. 359) [285]. Sue’s actions and reactions are constantly
faced, whether by Jude, by the narrator, or by Sue herself,
with this alternative: either she must be peculiar, or she
must be representative of her sex.2 It is worth noting, in
passing, that this alternative is one which certain critical
readings continue to enforce upon the text; a recent
example can be found in John Lucas’ argument that ‘we
need more in the way of women than the novel actually
gives us’ in order to judge whether Sue is to be seen as a
‘pathological case’ or as a ‘representative woman’.3 This
apart, it is noticeable that Sue’s life follows almost exactly
the course of the ‘after-years’ marked out for the female sex
in the earlier and notorious passage about the ‘inexorable
laws of nature’ and the ‘penalty of the sex’: that is,
‘injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement’ (pp.
160–1) [116]. It seems to me that Sue is to be seen as a
representative of her sex in this sense alone, that her
sexuality is the decisive element in her collapse. It has
become a critical reflex to refer to Sue Bridehead as sexless
or frigid, whether as an accusation of her, in the Lawrentian
tradition, or as an accusation of Hardy, as in Kate Millett.4
There is much in the literature of the New Woman that
appears to support such an assumption: their concern with
the double-standard, for instance, takes almost invariably
the form of a demand for male chastity, and some of the
more successful problem novels, such as Sarah Grand’s The
Heavenly Twins, turn on the terrible injuries wreaked on
women by libidinous and venereally-diseased husbands.
Jude itself provides some evidence for this argument also, in
Sue’s rather absurd wish ‘ “that Eve had not fallen, so that
… some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled
Paradise” ’ (p. 241) [184], or in the numerous revisions in
which Hardy removes expressions referring to Sue’s warmth
and spontaneity and substitutes references to her reserve or
coolness. In one scene, for instance, her reply to Jude’s
worries that he may have offended her reads thus in the
serial text: ‘ “Oh, no, no! You said enough to let me know
what had caused it. I have never had the least doubt of your
worthiness, dear, dear Jude! How glad I am you have
come!” ’. In the first edition, however, she is considerably
less affectionate and spontaneous: ‘ “O, I have tried not to!
You said enough to let me know what had caused it. I hope I
shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my poor
Jude! And I am glad you have come!” ’ As she comes to
meet Jude, the serial text runs: ‘She had come forward so
impulsively that Jude felt sure a moment later that she had
half-unconsciously expected him to kiss her.’ The revised
text, on the other hand, reads: ‘She had come forward
prettily; but Jude felt that she had hardly expected him to
kiss her.’5
It is simplistic, however, to equate such changes with a
total absence of sexual feeling, or with frigidity. They should
be seen, rather, as her response to the complexities and
difficulties of her sexuality and its role in her relationships
than as a straightforward denial of it. Hardy subjects Sue’s
sexuality to some of the same ironies which undercut Diana
Warwick’s sexual self-possession in Diana of the Crossways,
and for some of the same reasons. It is intimately connected
in both cases with the woman’s sense of selfhood, and the
reserve is, to quote John Goode, ‘not a “defect” of “nature”,
but … a necessary stand against being reduced to the
“womanly” ’.6 A refusal of the sexual dimension of
relationships can seem the only rational response to a
dilemma; in revolt against the double bind by which female-
male relationships are invariably interpreted as sexual and
by which, simultaneously, sexuality is controlled and
channelled into a single legalised relationship, Sue is forced
into a confused and confusing situation in which she wishes
at one and the same time to assert her right to a non-sexual
love and her right to a non-marital sexual liaison.7 It is the
conflict of the two contradictory pressures that makes her
behaviour so often seem like flirtation. Diana Warwick is a
victim of the same dilemma, for her unconventionality and
intelligence lead her to despise the taboo placed on
friendships with men, and yet any and every sexual
advance, whatever the state of her feelings toward the man,
is felt as at once an insult, a threat, and an attack. ‘The
freedom of one’s sex’ is a double-edged concept.
In the case of Sue Bridehead, her diagnosis of marriage as
constraint implies as its apparent corollary the equation of
non-marriage and freedom. The myth of the free individual
subject leads her to see her life, provided it lies outside
sexual coercion, as an affair of personal choices freely
made. Telling Jude of her unhappiness, she does not
perceive the irony in his repetition of her phrase:
“How can a woman be unhappy who has only been
married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?”
“ ‘Chose freely!’ ”
“Why do you repeat it?” (p. 227) [172].
Her tragedy takes in part the form of her gradual
confrontation with the fact of her non-freedom, with the
knowledge that she is no less constrained and reduced by
her denial of her sexuality than by Phillotson’s legal or
Jude’s emotional demands upon it. She must learn that
sexuality lies to a large degree outside the control of
rationality, will, choice. The serene confidence with which
she tells Jude of her sexless liaison with the undergraduate
and draws from it the general conclusion that ‘ “no average
man—no man short of a sensual savage—will molest a
woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she
invites him” ’ (p. 167) [122], is a fantasy of freedom and
control which she will not willingly surrender. Hardy states in
a letter to Edmund Gosse what the novel itself also implies,
that it is irrevocable sexual commitment which she fears
and abhors, and that she has attempted to retain control of
her sexuality by a straightforward restriction of her sexual
availability:
“One point illustrating this I could not dwell upon: that,
though she has children, her intimacies with Jude have
never been more than occasional, even when they
were living together …, and one of her reasons for
fearing the marriage ceremony is that she fears it
would be breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself at
pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while
uncontracted she feels at liberty to yield herself as
seldom as she chooses” (Later Years, p. 42).
The final, ironic twist is that when she can no longer fail to
recognise the limitations upon her freedom—the moment is
clearly marked for us in her identification of the three
commandments of the ‘ “something external” ’ which
ironically mock the Hebraic Ten Commandments (p. 347)
[274]—she simply re-makes the equation in reverse,
preserving the polar opposition of marriage and non-
marriage. In her re-marriage with Phillotson, she subjects
herself fully to the legalistic and Hebraic codes of the
ideology of marriage.
Sue, then, undergoes an exploration of the limits of a
liberationist impulse, the demands of a Millian individualism,
not in terms of biological destiny (although, at a time when
contraception and abortion were still very limited of access
and widely abhorred, the biological ‘destiny’ of motherhood
is a very formidable ‘given’ indeed), but in terms of the
impossibility of the free individual. This is, in a sense, a
response to certain feminist and anti-marriage novels of the
period, where the conversion of marriage into a civil
contract varying in individual circumstances (as in Mona
Caird), or the levelling ‘up’ of the double standard (as in The
Heavenly Twins), or the replacement of marriage by the free
union (as in The Woman Who Did), are seen as potential
guarantees of the freedom of women; symptoms of the
oppression of women are taken for the very structures of
that oppression, and a perspective of equal rights is seen as
not merely a necessary, but a sufficient programme for
liberation.
Nevertheless, there is a very important sense in which
Sue is right to equate her refusal of a sexual relationship
with her freedom, in that it avoids the surrender to
involuntary physiological processes which her pregnancies
entail. It is in this respect that women are at the very
junction of the ‘flesh and spirit’; the point where mind and
body are in potential conflict—this is the crucial area of that
dominance of the material over the intellectual in the
duality which is characteristic of the ideology of the period.
It is Sue, and not Jude, who is the primary site of that
‘deadly war waged between flesh and spirit’ of which Hardy
speaks in his Preface (p. 27) [5].8 In Jude, the two are
constantly juxtaposed, the dominance of his sexuality
displacing the dominance of his intellectual ambitions and
vice-versa in a continuing series. Jude’s sexuality is a
disruptive force in a way that it has not previously been for
Hardy’s male characters; there is no question here—except
in Jude’s tortured self-questioning after the death of his
children—of a predatory male sexuality destroying a weaker
and more vulnerable female through her sexuality, but
rather of a sexual nature in itself disturbing, partly because
it is so largely beyond the conscious processes of decision
and intention. When Jude first meets Arabella his intentions
and wishes are overmastered by his sexual attraction
toward her; the phrase used in ms. is ‘in the authoritative
operation of a natural law’ but this is cancelled and a less
scientific phrase finally substituted—‘in commonplace
obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters’ [35]. It
is this episodic ‘battle’ of Jude’s which gives the novel its
similarly episodic form, in which there is a repeated pattern
of the abrupt confrontation of his inner life with his material
situation: his meditation over the well is broken by the
strident tones of his aunt [11], his sympathies with the
hungry birds are interrupted by Farmer Troutham’s clacker
[15], and his recitation of his intellectual attainments is
answered by the slap of a pig’s penis against his ear [34];
from this point on, the dons of Christminster temporarily
give way to the Donnes of Cresscombe. Jude’s attempt to
unite the two through his marriage founders with the
significant image of Arabella’s fingermarks, hot and greasy
from lard-making, on the covers of his classic texts. His
wavering thereafter between the two women enacts the
alteration of dominance within himself. Points of crisis and
transition are marked by Jude’s personalised rites de
passage: his burning of his books, auctioning of his
furniture, removing his pillow from the double bed, and so
on.9
Kate Millett argues that Sue is the ‘victim of a cultural
literary convention (Lily and Rose)’ that cannot allow her to
have both a mind and sexuality.10 The very persistence with
which Jude attempts to bring Sue to admit her sexuality into
their relationship suggests that this is too simple an account
of the self-evident contrast of Sue and Arabella. Hardy
seems to have been making conscious use of the
convention within the figure of Sue; her name means ‘lily’,
and there is symbolism in the scene in which Jude playfully
forces her into contact with the roses of which she says ‘ “I
suppose it is against the rules to touch them” ’ (p. 308)11
[241]. It is interesting to note, by the way, that in the year
of Jude’s publication, Hardy was collaborating with Florence
Henniker on a story where the heroine’s name, Rosalys,
seems consciously to draw together the two symbolic
traditions.12
For Sue, mind and body, intellect and sexuality, are in a
complex and disturbing interdependence, given iconic
representation in her twin deities, Apollo and Venus, which
she transmutes for Miss Font-over—prefiguring the later
collapse of her intellect and repudiation of her sexuality—
into the representative of religious orthodoxy, St. Peter, and
the repentant sexual sinner, St. Mary Magdalen. Further,
there are the complementary images of Sue as ‘a white
heap’ on the ground after her desperate leap from her
bedroom window (p. 242) [185], and as a ‘heap of black
clothes’ on the floor of St. Silas after the death of her
children (p. 358) [283]; as victim of her sexuality and as
victim of religious ideology, she is the arena of their conflict.
Her intellectual education throughout the novel runs
alongside her emotional involvements: the undergraduate
who lent her his books and wanted her to be his mistress;
Phillotson who gives her chaperoned private lessons in the
evenings; and, of course, Jude, with whom she spends much
of her time in discussion. But in each case, sexuality is a
destructive, divisive force, wrecking the relationship and
threatening the precarious balance in Sue’s life between her
intellectual adventurousness and her sexual reserve. Her
relationship with Jude involves her in the involuntary
physiological processes of conception, pregnancy and
childbirth, and these in turn enforce upon her a financial and
emotional dependence on Jude which is destructive for both
of them.
Sue, then, is at the centre of this irreconcilability of ‘flesh’
and ‘spirit’; yet she is constantly distanced from the novel’s
centre of consciousness by the careful manipulation of
points of view. A variety of interpreters interpose between
her and the reader—Phillotson, Widow Edlin, even Arabella;
but chiefly, of course, Jude. There is a kind of collusion
between him and the narrator, which is most evident in the
scene of Jude’s first walk round Christminster, when he sees
the phantoms of past luminaries of the university; the actual
names are withheld from the reader as if to convey the
sense of a shared secret between narrator and character.
This collusion enables us to follow the movements of Jude’s
thoughts and actions—the narrator’s examination of his
consciousness is authoritative. Sue, on the other hand, is, as
John Bayley remarks, consistently exhibited;13 she is
pictorialised, rendered in a series of visual images which
give some accuracy to Vigar’s descriptions of the novel as
employing a ‘ “snapshot” method’.14 Sue’s consciousness is
opaque, filtered as it is through the interpretations of Jude,
with all their attendant incomprehensions and distortions; it
is this that makes of her actions impulses, of her confused
and complex emotions flirtation, and of her motives ‘one
lovely conundrum’ (p. 156) [113].15 The histories of Jude and
Sue are, in some respects, remarkably similar, and yet she
is made the instrument of Jude’s tragedy, rather than the
subject of her own. In a sense the reader’s knowledge of her
exists only through the perceiving consciousness of Jude,
and so it is that after his death, she is not shown at all;
Arabella takes on Jude’s role of interpreting her to us. The
effect of this distancing is to give what is openly a man’s
picture of a woman; there is no attempt, as there is with
Tess Durbeyfield, to make her consciousness and experience
transparent, accessible to authoritative explanation and
commentary. She is resistant to appropriation by the male
narrator, and so the partiality of the novel is not naturalised.
It is often said that Sue’s ‘frigidity’ brings about not only
her own tragedy, but also—and in this view more
importantly—Jude’s.16 In fact, this tragedy follows upon not
merely the sexual consummation of their relationship, but
Sue’s assimilation, through her parenthood, into a pseudo-
marriage. Once she has children, she is forced to live with
Jude the economic life of the couple, and gradually to
reduce her opposition to marriage to formalism by
pretending to marry Jude and adopting his name. It is
motherhood—her own humiliation by the respectable wives
who hound her and Jude from their work, Little Father Time’s
taunting by his schoolmates—that convinces her that ‘ “the
world and its ways have a certain worth” ’ (p. 368) [293];
this is an insertion in the first edition), and so begins her
collapse into ‘ “enslavement to forms” ’ (p. 405) [325]. For
the anti-marriage theme of the novel is not entirely
concerned with legally or sacramentally defined marriage,
though these play a significant role, and it differs again here
from most of the contemporary New Woman fiction. In most
cases (as in Grant Allen, for example) it is merely the legal
aspect that is attacked, while a ‘free union’ which duplicates
the marital relationship in every respect but this is seen as a
radical alternative. Even for a radical feminist theorist like
Mona Caird, it is the inequality of the terms on which the
contract is based that is the root of the problem:
The injustice of obliging two people, on pain of social
ostracism, either to accept the marriage-contract as it
stands, or to live apart, is surely self-evident.… [I]f it
were to be decreed that the woman, in order to be
legally married, must gouge out her right eye, no sane
person would argue that the marriage-contract was
perfectly just, simply because the woman was at liberty
to remain single if she did not relish the conditions. Yet
this argument is used on behalf of the present contract,
as if it were really any sounder in the one case than in
the other.17
Her solution is to propose a more flexible and personalised
contractual relationship. Jude and Sue experience the same
sense that predetermined social forms, however they may
be for other people, cannot suit ‘ “the queer sort of people
we are” ’ they regard themselves unequivocally as the
argument from exception, despite various intimations that
they are simply precursors of a general change of feeling. It
is curious that this argument contradicts the general
tendency of the attack on marriage, for if they are
exceptional in their relationship, it is in their ‘perfect …
reciprocity’ [167], their ‘ “extraordinary sympathy, or
similarity” ’ [188]. Their Shelleyan vision of themselves as
twin souls, two halves of a single whole, is a version of
Romanticism which is in conflict with the attack on marriage
as enforcing a continuing and exclusive commitment; the
same contradiction is apparent in Shelley’s Epipsychidion
itself, an important source for Jude.18 Sue and Jude see
themselves as giving freely just this kind and degree of
commitment, embodying in a ‘purer’, because
unconstrained, form the very ideal of marriage; indeed, they
often talk of their relationship precisely as a marriage, and
refer to each other as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Other
relationships of this kind are perceived by them as
invariably gross and degrading—the cowed and pregnant
bride who marries her seducer ‘ “to escape a nominal
shame which was owing to the weakness of her character” ’,
the boozy, pock-marked woman marrying ‘ “for a lifetime” ’
the convict whom she really wants ‘ “for a few hours” ’ (pp.
297–8) [231–32]. Their own relationship, however, they
perceive as refined and singled out, its sexuality as merely
the symbol of its spirituality. But, in the course of the novel,
they are forced to recognise that their relationship is not
transcendant of time, place, and material circumstance, as
they have tried to make it; their Romantic delusion gives
way, leaving Jude cynical, but in Sue’s case leading on into
the ideology of legalised and sacramental marriage that her
experiences have led her to respect. Ironically, it is a
debased Romantic version that concludes the book, through
Arabella’s final statement that ‘ “She’s never found peace
since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he
is now!” ’ [332]. Sue comes to see in Phillotson her husband
in law, as Tess comes to see in Alec her husband in nature;
the logic is only apparently opposite, for in both cases it is
underpinned by that sense of the irrevocability of
commitment which is inculcated by the ideology of
marriage. Jude illustrates how a relationship conceived by its
protagonists as in opposition to marriage cannot help
becoming its replica—that it is in the lived texture of the
relationship that the oppression resides, and not in the small
print of the contract. The ‘alternative’ relationship proves
ultimately no alternative at all, for its material situation
presses upon it to shape it into a pre-existing form. Jude and
Sue escape none of the oppressions of marriage, but they
incur over and above these the penalties reserved for
transgressors against it. There is no form for the relationship
to take except those named and determined by the very
form that they seek to transcend: unless it is marriage, it is
adultery or fornication. It is in this sense that Jude comes to
see that he too is one of ‘ “that vast band of men shunned
by the virtuous—the men called seducers” ’ (p. 352) [278].

† From Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and
Narrative Form (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 140–50. Reprinted by
permission of the author. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the print
version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. Cousin, or brother and sister, relationships were widely used in feminist
fiction to contrast the treatment and expectations and experiences of sex-
differentiated pairs; e.g., in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856),
and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893).
2. Cf. John Goode, ‘Sue Bridehead and the New Woman,’ in Women Writing and
Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London, 1979), pp. 100–13.
3. John Lucas, The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century
Provincial Novel (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), pp. 188–91.
4. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy,’ in Phoenix: The Posthumous
Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (1936; rpt. London, 1961),
pp. 495–510; and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London, 1971), pp. 130–4.
5. Harper’s, European ed. 29 (1895), 576; and Jude the Obscure (London,
1895), p. 161.
 6. John Goode, ‘Woman and the Literary Text,’ in The Rights and Wrongs of
Women, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 242.
7. See her comments on p. 186 [here] (‘ “Their philosophy only recognises
relations based on animal desire” ’) and p. 222 [here] (‘ “they can’t give it
continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to
receive it.” ’).
8. Cf. Geoffrey Thurley, The Psychology of Hardy’s Novels: The Nervous and the
Statuesque (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1975), p. 191.
9. Cf. William H. Marshall, The World of the Victorian Novel (London, 1967), pp.
404–24.
10. Sexual Politics, p. 133.
11. Cf. Mary Jacobus, ‘Sue the Obscure,’ Essays in Criticism, 25 (1975), 304–28.
12. ‘The Spectre of the Real,’ in In Scarlet and Grey: Stories of Soldiers and
Others (London, 1896), pp. 164–208.
13. John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy (Cambridge, 1978), p. 201.
14. Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality (London,
1974), p. 193.
15. Cf. Elizabeth Langland, ‘A Perspective of One’s Own: Thomas Hardy and the
Elusive Sue Bridehead,’ Studies in the Novel, 12 (1980), 12–28.
16. E.g., Shalom Rachman, ‘Character and Theme in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure,’
English, 22, No. 113 (1973), 45–53; and T. B. Tomlinson, The English Middle-
Class Novel (London, 1976), pp. 121–4.
17. Mona Caird, ‘The Future of the Home,’ in The Morality of Marriage and Other
Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (London, 1897), p. 117.
18. For an interesting account of the Shelleyan motif in the novel, see Michael E.
Hassett, ‘Compromised Romanticism in Jude the Obscure,’ Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 25 (1971), 432–43.

J. B. BULLEN
[Contemporary Realist Painting in Jude
the Obscure]†
* * *
[I]n Jude the Obscure the influence of contemporary realism
does much more than merely provide the inspiration for one
or two scenes, it also serves to establish one of the principal
imaginative parameters of the novel. This influence can be
detected mainly in the depiction of agrarian life, and this is
also true of the paintings of Bastien-Lepage and George
Clausen. In the paintings, the uncompromising harshness of
country life is communicated in part through the choice of
setting and in part through the treatment of light and colour.
In works like Bastien-Lepage’s Saison d’Octobre or Poor
Fauvette (1881) or George Clausen’s The Stonepickers
(1887), not only is the setting featureless and dreary, but
the colour range is very narrow. Both painters consciously
avoided strong colour contrasts in favour of what were
called ‘relations’—a limited tonal range comprising mainly
tertiary pigments. Walter Sickert reacted strongly against
what seemed to him an unnecessarily spiritless manner of
painting. ‘What are the truths you have gained’, he asked in
connection with Bastien-Lepage’s Saison d’Octobre,
‘compared to the truths you have lost? To life and spirit,
light and air?’1 In Clausen’s The Stonepickers, the
foreground, the background, and the sky are brought into
close contact with each other, almost losing their separate
identities in the narrow range of whites and browns.
Even before Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure, there is
evidence that he had experimented with the use of the
pictorial conventions of this style. With the Turneresque
visions of sunlight and colour left behind her in the valley of
the Froom, Tess arrives at Flintcomb-Ash. Here the scene
‘was almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree
within sight; there was not, at this season, a green pasture—
nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere; in large fields
divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels’ (Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, ch. 42). Not only does the setting strongly
resemble those of Bastien-Lepage and his followers, the
colouring also reflects their preoccupation with tonal
relations.
The whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a
complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to
brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore,
in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of
countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two
 upper and nether visages confronted each other all day
long, the white face looking down on the brown face,
and the brown face looking up at the white face (Tess of
the d’Urbervilles, ch. 43).
Anthropomorphism apart, the pictorialism in this scene is
very strong. Two girls toiling in a colourless and monotonous
field under an equally monotonous sky, where distance has
all but been absorbed by the narrow tonal range, might,
without incongruity, be the subject for a contemporary
realist canvas entitled The Swede-Cutters.
In Jude the Obscure the scenes of rural hardship are
concentrated in the early scenes at Marygreen, and most
especially in the episode in which Jude is sent as a bird-
scarer to a nearby field. In order to reach this, he ‘pursued a
path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression
in the general level of the upland, which was sown as a
corn-field. This vast concave was the scene of his labours …
and he descended into the midst of it’ [13]. We know that
the immediate inspiration for this episode was for Hardy a
highly personal one. In 1892 he had been investigating his
family records, and his researches had taken him to Great
Fawley in Berkshire—the place where his grandmother, Mary
Head, had been born. The visit was not a happy one, and it
involved for Hardy the sense of a personality divided
between past and present. He wrote in his diary:
October 1892. At Great Fawley, Berks. Entered a
ploughed vale which might be called the Valley of
Brown Melancholy. The silence is remarkable.… Though
I am alive with the living I can only see the dead here,
and am scarcely conscious of the happy children at
play. (Life, pp. 250–5)
Hardy’s visit to Great Fawley was part of an attempt to
identify his own origins, and, like his creator, Jude also feels
cut off from his ancestors.
 The brown surface of the field went right up towards
the sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the
mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated
the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the
scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the
midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at [Jude’s]
approach, and the path athwart the fallow by which he
had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom,
though once by many of his own dead family. [13]
Once again, however, the scene bears a striking similarity
to certain contemporary realist canvases. In Bastien-
Lepage’s Poor Fauvette, for example, a picture which,
according to the Art Journal of 1896 ‘was probably better
known in Britain than any other Bastien-Lepage painted’,2 a
lonely child stands in the foreground of a dreary and sunless
landscape, an emblem of vacancy and solitude. The low-
keyed, muted colours, of which brown and olive-green
predominate, the high horizon, the bare tree, and the single
cow, all convey a sense of loneliness and alienation.
Similarly, in Hardy’s account of Jude’s field, the high and
unrelieved horizon-line shuts in the solitary figure,
conveying a strong impression of bleak, but inescapable,
dreariness. We have seen how the critics of this style of
painting accused both Bastien-Lepage and his followers of
overlooking the poetry of country life, and of concentrating
exclusively on the harsh, the utilitarian, and the ugly. Jude
responds to his own setting in a similar way. ‘ “How ugly it is
here!” he murmured’, and his disgust is prompted by a sight
which resembles the composition of a number of Bastien-
Lepage’s landscapes.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the
channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a
meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its
gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of
the few recent months. [14]
The utilitarian view of this scene, however, is only one way
of perceiving it. As Hardy wrote in 1865, ‘The poetry of a
scene … does not lie in the scene at all’ (Life, p. 50), and to
the eye attuned to the presence of the human mark on the
land, the outward ugliness hides a deeper meaning; history
is written everywhere on the landscape. Consequently,
Jude’s isolation is deepened, because he cannot see that
to every clod and stone there really attached
associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs
from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of
sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site,
first or last, or energy, gaiety, horseplay, bickerings,
weariness. [14]
This is not an appeal to a sentimental or nostalgic view of
the land. It also involves an awareness of pain and suffering;
it recognizes how ‘under the hedge which divided the field
from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to
lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by the
next harvest’ [11]. But it also recognizes the continuity in
human life, and how the ugliest and baldest scenes contain
within them something of the poetry of that continuity.
Jude’s tragedy is that he has no access to this vision, and
that he is no more responsive to it than the rooks that he
has been sent to scare. ‘This, neither Jude nor the rooks
around him considered’, since for them, Hardy adds, this
was merely ‘a lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only
the quality of a work-ground, and in the other that of a
granary good to feed in’ [14].

* * *

† From J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of
Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 245–48. © J. B. Bullen
 1986. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Page numbers in
square brackets refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. André Theuriet, ed., Jules Bastien-Lepage and his Art: A Memoir (London,
1892), p. 136.
2. Art Journal, NS 35 (1896), p. 200.

F. B. PINION
[Jude the Obscure as Autobiography]†
Hardy’s life was relatively uneventful; and but for his
creative imagination and literary successes it would not
have been very exciting; it certainly was not very
sensational, apart from the effect on the public of works
such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Why
a story of dreams or aspirations and continual failure, of
inveiglement into marriage by seduction, of broken
marriages, unmarried lovers who live together and rear
children only to find them hanged, of marriages which
please God in the eyes of the Church and lead to suicide
and spiritual death—why Jude the Obscure, in short—should
have led early reviewers to deduce that it was ‘honest
autobiography’ must surely occasion some surprise. Not
until nearly twenty-four years later, when he was roused by
a letter from ‘an inquirer with whom the superstition still
lingered’, did Hardy trouble to reply, dictating a letter to his
wife Florence, who wrote: ‘To your enquiry if Jude the
Obscure is autobiographical, I have to answer that there is
not a scrap of personal detail in it, it having the least to do
with his own life of all his books.’ When, in the course of
preparing his Life, he reached the period ending with the
1895–96 reviews of Jude, he reverted to this letter, and
added:
Some of the incidents were real in so far as that he had
heard of them, or come in contact with them when they
were occurring to people he knew; but no more. It is
 interesting to mention that on his way to school he did
once meet with a youth like Jude who drove the bread-
cart of a widow, a baker, like Mrs Fawley, and carried on
his studies at the same time, to the serious risk of other
drivers in the lanes; which youth asked him to lend him
his Latin grammar.1
One can sympathize with Hardy, for the frenetic itch to
read autobiography into this novel has never been more
blatantly indulged than in recent years. Of course, Hardy
was too absolute; there are scraps of personal detail in it,
but details only, and not very considerable. Three examples
come to mind: Hardy’s childhood wish not to grow up, as he
lay with the sun’s rays streaming through the interstices of
his straw hat, more accurately reproduced in Jude than in
‘Childhood Among the Ferns’; Hardy and Jude’s reading of
the same portions of the Iliad in their teens; and the placing
of a looking-glass by the window to give the invalid Hardy a
view of a glorious sunset, repeated by Sue for Phillotson, as
Hardy remembered in his Life long before denying
autobiographical inclusions in his novel. The letter of
rejection from T. Tetuphenay of Biblioll College (his Greek
name implying the ‘hard slap’ he administered to Jude)
presents a fourth possibility, reported evidence indicating
that it could have been a transcript of a reply to Hardy from
Benjamin Jowett of Balliol. The probability is that such
recollections and adaptations from the author’s life
comprise less than one-per-cent of the text.
How much of a writer enters the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of his characters, of either sex, can never be
assessed. Speaking from experience in ‘The Three Voices of
Poetry’, T. S. Eliot declares his conviction that the author not
only ‘imparts something of himself to his characters’ but ‘is
influenced by the characters he creates’. Hardy’s views on
marriage were not fixed; he indulges them, no doubt,
through Phillotson and Sue, but precisely what his views
were, and how far they were turned or moulded by the
pressures of imaginative circumstance, no one can say.
Undoubtedly the intellectual enfranchisement of the Sue
whose intellect ‘scintillated like a star’ found expression in
those Hardyan views which had culminated in his theory of
the Unfulfilled Intention:
that the First Cause worked automatically like a
somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage; that at
the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed
never to have been contemplated such a development
of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures
subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking
and educated humanity.
Whether Jude’s silly lovesick dream, on losing Sue to
Phillotson, of her having children in her own likeness reflects
one of Hardy’s thoughts, as the poem ‘To a Motherless Child’
seems to suggest, is uncertain; he published the poem as a
whimsy, and he must have known that the same idea came
to the maudlin hero of Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. It is not
known whether the poem was written before or after Jude.
An imaginative novelist may in some respect, at some
stage or other, draw from people he has known in depicting
some of his characters. Hardy acknowledged (as Florence
told Lady Hoare) that he had one of his uncles in mind when
he created Jude; this was John Antell, a Puddletown
shoemaker, and a self-educated classical scholar who was
occasionally the worse for drink. Nor should Horace Moule,
another inebriate, be forgotten; like Jude he was a classical
scholar with ‘Christminster’ connections; according to his
friend Hardy, he may have had a bastard son who was
brought up in Australia; and like Jude he committed suicide
after being irrevocably parted from the woman he loved.
How much of Sue ever existed outside Hardy’s
imagination is a much more interesting question. The
training-college which his two sisters attended at Salisbury
(‘Melchester’) provided the background for one of his
sensational episodes. (How fact and fiction can combine to
create tradition was illustrated during my first visit to the
college nearly twenty years ago, when I was told by a young
part-time lecturer, who had become an enthusiastic
volunteer guide, that one of Hardy’s sisters had been an
unsatisfactory student and made her escape by wading
through the river. Eventually, after a further visit and more
correspondence, I was sent copies of Mary and Kate Hardy’s
college certificates; there was only one word, term after
term, for the conduct of both, and not surprisingly it was
‘Good’.) Hardy’s close kinship with Mary made him
acquainted with the College of Sarum St Michael, but it was
from his younger sister Kate, years later, in 1877–78, that
he heard more about its institutional hardships and
restrictions. He revived his training-college impressions by
visits to two London colleges for women in 1891, one of
them Stockwell College, where his cousin Tryphena Sparks
had been trained. Perhaps he owed something to
recollections of her experience there: and her early teaching
with the headmaster in the boys’ half of the schools at
Puddletown may have given him the idea of placing Sue
with Phillotson in a similar position at ‘Shaston’
(Shaftesbury).
On the train to London in March 1890 Hardy began the
ambiguously titled poem ‘Thoughts of Phena’. ‘It was a
curious instance of sympathetic telepathy’, he afterwards
thought, for at the time of his recalling her Tryphena was
dying, as he learned soon after her death. Perhaps one of
the precursors of those disharmonies which marred the last
twenty years of his married life with Emma had brought
back the memory of the girl whose affection and gaiety now
assured him that she was another of his lost prizes. The
thought (the recurring image of the elusive ‘well-beloved’)
and wakened interest in Tryphena Sparks influenced Hardy’s
last two novels. In the first preface to Jude the Obscure he
writes: ‘The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes
made in 1887 and onwards, some of the circumstances
being suggested by the death of a woman in the former
year.’ When the lonely Jude muses sadly on Old Midsummer
Eve, hoping to see ‘the phantom of the Beloved’, and
regretting Nature’s wilfulness in not allowing issue from one
parent only, he expresses the thought of ‘To a Motherless
Child’: ‘If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I
could go and see her child—hers solely’, he says.2 Before
beginning Jude the Obscure, Hardy had turned this notion to
ridicule and bitter satire in the fantasy of The Well-Beloved,
where daughter and grand-daughter have the first Avice’s
likeness, and all in turn attract the love of the artistic Jocelyn
Pierston. The serial of 1892 anticipates Jude in its criticism
of the marriage law, but more significantly in the physical
revulsion of the third Avide towards her elderly husband
Jocelyn, and in the Phillotson-like humanity with which he
releases her from marital bondage. It is in The Well-Beloved
rather than in Jude that Tryphena’s fictional memorial is
found, most patently, and with hardly any disguise, in the
effect of the first Avice’s death on Jocelyn:
He loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had
never loved her in life. He had thought of her at distant
intervals during the twenty years since that parting
occurred, and only as somebody he could have
wedded. Yet now the times of youthful friendship with
her, in which he had learnt every note of her innocent
nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionate
attachment, embittered by regret beyond words.… She
had been another man’s wife almost the whole time
since he was estranged from her, and now she was a
corpse. Yet the absurdity did not make his grief the
less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost
radiant, purity of this new-sprung affection for a flown
spirit forbade him to check it.3
 Jude the Obscure was postponed, partly because Hardy’s
life was too busy and unsettled; mainly, I suspect, because
he was unable to plan the novel to his satisfaction. Although
he had drawn up an outline, he had to make a structural
alteration of the opening after embarking on full-length
composition, and it was not until 1894 that the novel began
to warm up; in January he was ‘creeping on a little’ and
becoming interested in his heroine as she took ‘shape and
reality’, though she was still ‘very nebulous’. So he informed
Florence Henniker, with whom his friendship began in May
1893, when he and Mrs Hardy were the guests of her
widowed brother, the second Lord Houghton, Viceroy of
Ireland. Mrs Henniker was his hostess, and Hardy, not on
good terms with Emma at the time, found Florence Henniker
a ‘charming, intuitive woman’. An ambitious young novelist,
she was not reluctant to encourage his friendship and
literary patronage; he was only too ready to give her literary
advice and encouragement. At first it was difficult for Hardy
to adjust himself socially, but their friendship was based on
mutual esteem, and lasted until her death. Beautiful and
fascinating, she not surprisingly went to Hardy’s head;
victim of almost inevitable imaginings, he soon thought he
was in love with her. She is the ‘one rare fair woman’ of
‘Wessex Heights’, where he tells us that she never knew
how much he loved her. Just how the memory of Tryphena
Sparks would have helped to create the heroine in Jude, had
she not, as a result of time and chance, been displaced
imaginatively by Mrs Henniker in the creation and
development of Sue’s character, will never be known. In
1896 Hardy told his friend Edward Clodd that Mrs Henniker
had been his ‘model’ for Sue; his second wife Florence told
Professor Purdy that Sue Bridehead was ‘in part drawn from
Mrs Henniker’. Sue is presented as an epicene intellectual,
sexually cold and fastidious but tantalizingly attractive, a
type which had always fascinated Hardy, and which he
would have attempted to draw earlier had he not found it so
difficult, he told Edmund Gosse.4 The growing attractiveness
of her personality and the progressiveness of her views (not
Mrs Henniker’s) took charge, the story carrying its author
into such ‘unexpected fields’ that he was uncertain of its
future by April 1894, when he urged the cancellation of a
publishing contract which had led him to promise ‘a tale
that could not offend the most fastidious maiden’. When the
novel was published in November 1895, he told Gosse that
it had not altogether been constructed, ‘for, beyond a
certain point, the characters necessitated it, and I simply let
it come’. The way it developed had much to do with Mrs
Henniker.
Some of Hardy’s thoughts about her are clearly
transferred to Jude. Hardy discovered that he and Mrs
Henniker had been reading Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’
simultaneously, and attributed this coincidence to their
‘mutual influence’. At one point in the novel (IV.v) [201] Jude
quotes the poem with reference to Sue:
A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman …
Earlier (III.ix) [154] he sees her in terms of the same poem,
‘so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen
trembling through her limbs’. Before the first flush of his
imaginative love had waned, Hardy had endowed Mrs
Henniker with this Shelleyan spirituality, a hint of it
occurring in a letter of 18 December 1893: one great gain of
seeing her recently, he tells her, is that ‘certain nice and
dear features’ in her character, ‘half-forgotten, through their
being of that etheral intangible sort’, are now revived.
Reverting to the passage just quoted from Jude, we can see
how Florence Henniker existed for Hardy at the time of
writing: ‘the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that
he had ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings’ [154].
Sue and Jude have ‘complete mutual understanding’; they
are ‘almost the two parts of a single whole’ [237], almost
the ideal union Hardy had expressed a yearning for at the
end of the fifth chapter of Tess. Elsewhere in Jude he writes:
‘That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him
… returned upon him with cruel persistency …’. The tragic
irony of this reflection is evident in the title-page epigraph
Hardy wrote, his own marriage much in mind, in August
1895, for a new edition of The Woodlanders:
‘Not boskiest bow’r,
When hearts are ill affin’d,
Hath tree of pow’r
To shelter from the wind!’
‘What name shall I give to the heroine of my coming long
story when I get at it?’ he asked Mrs Henniker when he
wrote on Sunday, 22 October 1893. What he wished may be
guessed from the appearance of ‘Florence’ in the signature
of Sue’s more distant letters to Jude about the time of her
first marriage to Phillotson.
It should be stressed that, though she resembles Hardy’s
impressions of Mrs Henniker in some respects, Sue
developed pre-eminently in his imagination. Yet there is one
other passage in Jude (III.iv) [127] which not only reflects
Florence Henniker but bears on the tragic resolution of the
novel: ‘that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing.…
If he could only get over the sense of her sex … what a
comrade she would make.… She was nearer to him than any
other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely
believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him
from her.’ Hardy and Mrs Henniker differed profoundly in
creed; she was Anglo-Catholic and proof against his
protestations that as a writer she needed to be intellectually
twenty-five years ahead of her time. How could she, the
daughter of Shelley’s champion, he asked, allow herself ‘to
be enfeebled to a belief in ritualistic ecclesiasticism’? He
would have to trust to imagination for a woman
enfranchised from ‘retrograde superstitions’. This, of course,
was Sue before tragedy made her retrogressive. Hardy, as a
passage (III.iii) [116] on women students in training at
Melchester shows—and this is based on observations made
at Whitelands Training College (Life, p. 235)—believed that
women are the weaker sex, not as well endowed as men to
endure suffering and shock. The loss of her children is seen
by Sue as a sign of God’s anger that she and Jude have
ignored ecclesiastical conformity, or ‘lived in sin’, as the
popular saying goes. Her prostration below the Cross in the
‘ceremonial’ church of St Silas, and her declaration that
‘Arabella’s child killing mine was a judgment—the right
slaying the wrong’ made Jude explode with hatred of
‘Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it
may be called’. Her physical self-sacrifice and spiritual death
in remarriage to Phillotson, which is presented as her
crucifixion, is not quite Hardy’s last comment on the
superstition that sanctifies lasting wedlock for incompatible
couples whom ‘God hath joined together’: Jude’s remarriage
is a grotesque satire on the subject. Both are crazed by their
losses: one ‘creed-drunk’, the other ‘gin-drunk’. How Jude
the Obscure would have reached its tragic endings had
Hardy not found Mrs Henniker intractably unemancipated in
her religious beliefs is one of those insoluble questions
which are worth asking.
By influencing the character and role of Sue, Hardy’s new
friendship seems to have contributed a more exciting
creative element to Jude than any other factor.

* * *

† From F. B. Pinion, “Jude the Obscure: Origins in Life and Literature,” Thomas
Hardy Annual No. 4, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 148–55.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Page numbers in square brackets
refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. See F. E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London, 1962), 274, 392. [See
here—Editor.]
2. Jude 3.8. [See here.]
3. Life p. 272.
4. Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (London, 1897), Part Second, ch. 3. See
here for Hardy’s letter to Gosse, November 20, 1895 [Editor].

ELAINE SHOWALTER
[A “Biological Trap”]†
* * *
Jude too is doomed by the inexorable laws of nature and
inheritance. Late Victorian psychiatrists had warned that
working-class men who tried to better themselves were
risking madness from a kind of intellectual work their
heredity had not prepared them to handle. Sir George
Savage had seen “constant examples in Bethlem of young
men, who, having left the plough for the desk, have found,
after years of struggle, that their path was barred by social
or other hindrances, and disappointment, worry, and the
solitude of a great city have produced insanity of an
incurable type.”1 Jude is chiefly broken, however, by his
sexuality. Here Hardy was deeply ambivalent. The
transgressive sexual images of Stevenson and Wilde, of
carnivalesque debauchery and misrule, make a dim
appearance in Hardy’s realistic narrative with Arabella’s
pigsty, with the brawling itinerant carnival troupe that
appears to defend Phillotson’s morals, and with the Great
Wessex Agricultural Fair. But for Hardy, fairs, like the ones in
The Mayor of Casterbridge where Henchard sells his wife,
were shameful occasions. And if male sexuality leads to
drunkenness, fighting, disease, and transgression, female
sexuality, as in Dracula, threatens the male with castration.
Jude thinks he wants Sue to desire him, but at heart he
prefers her “phantasmal, bodiless” [211] sexlessness to the
full-bodied hoggish sensuality of Arabella. As in The
Woodlanders and other Hardy novels, marriage is a
biological trap, a man-trap baited by female allure. Jude
wonders whether “the women are to blame … or is it the
artificial system of things under which the normal sex-
impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and
springes” [178]. * * *
The most troubling character in the novel has always
been Little Father Time, the offspring of Jude’s botched
marriage to Arabella. * * *
Little Father Time, in my view, can best be understood in
the contexts of the feminist protest fiction of the period, and
of its conventions relating to the prematurely aged and
psychologically disturbed syphilitic child. Hardy adapts
these conventions to make Father Time a victim of spoiled
heredity like his parents before, a “preternaturally old boy”
[227] who pays with his sanity and his life for the
intolerance, cruelty, and narrowness of his society. He is the
mad child whose breakdown is the signifier of the conflicts,
lies, and hypocrisies of the sexual system. He becomes, as
Hardy says, “the whole tale of their situation. On that little
shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow
which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the
accidents, mistakes, fears, errors, of the last. He was their
nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term.
For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their
ill-assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of
these he had died” [273].

* * *

† From Elaine Showalter, “Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de
Siècle,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp.
106–08. © 1986 The English Institute. Reprinted by permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the print
version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. George Savage, Insanity and Allied Neuroses (Philadelphia, 1884), p. 22.
 JOHN GOODE
[Place, the Social Order, and Phillotson]†
* * *
[I]t is structured according to a determinative role of place
which presents us with a precise graph of the socialization
of the characters. ‘At’, the word which links the title of each
part, implies a double negation of the subject since although
it defines a location it does not suggest, in fact in most
cases positively denies accommodation—thus at various
stages the characters are placed but have no place.
Moreover, there is a shift in the significance of place
progressively from the purely given (Marygreen) to the
chosen by gesture (Christminster), the chosen by
compromise, blocked gesture (Melchester and even more
Shaston), the determined solely by economic necessity
(Aldbrickham and elsewhere). The arbitrariness is vital: they
both have to go to these places and these places have no
meaning for them. Thus finally the arbitrarily asserted
return is the locative equivalent of the nevertheless which
we have encountered as the key action of the late fiction,
but significantly as return and not as a gestural metonymy.
This gives us a triadic structure in two ways. First it
constitutes an onion, since Marygreen and Christminster
again both universalize their predicaments in metaphysical
terms. Christminster and Aldbrickham are both about the
condition of the working class, and at the centre, Melchester
and Shaston, preoccupied as they are with training and
marriage respectively, personalize, so that there is a vortex
of particularization. But in terms of a linear structure it also
means that the first and the last sections act as a symbolic
frame for the realistic narrative (which is one reason why
the novel seems to have no frame, since frames should not
really be in the picture). That use of the second person
which I indicated as important earlier is the keynote of
Marygreen, which centres on the field and which in spite of
sharp social observation, works out to a highly generalized
level.1 ‘But nobody did come because nobody does’
indicates a shift from the condition of Jude to the condition
of man: the field is the ontology of the unnecessary life. As
soon as he moves to Christminster, Jude embarks on a
history marked by the specific institutions of his time and
the specific relationship to them he has as working man
(and Sue as woman). It is not the field and God’s gardener,
but the city, the stonemason’s yard and the Master of
Bibliol, the marriage bed and the husband. At the end,
however, the novel is transformed again. Just as the
metonymy of the gesture (‘thither J.F.’) lifts the novel out of
its field and into the urban life of the nineteenth century, so
the metonymy of the return is to ‘the centre of my dream’—
to ‘the reflected sunshine of its crumbling walls’ (my italics).
It is a return to a symbolic mode but not a symbolism
generated by the metaphoric eye of the narrator (making
the actual field the field of life), but a theatrical gesture
generated out of the protagonists’ despair of dealing with
life ‘realistically’. Jude’s speech, Father Time’s euthanasic
infanticide, Sue’s conversion and histrionic remarriage make
the text a performance. The novel restates itself—as ‘myth’,
as social problem novel, and as (avant-garde) theatre.

* * *
Whatever ideological end Sue travels to she leaves two
residual traces, the most surprising of which is Phillotson,
whose original role is that of order. When Jude calls himself
an order-loving man he is referring to Sue’s revulsion from
her husband, and Phillotson himself complains that ‘there’s
no regularity in your sentiments’, complaining when she
quotes J. S. Mill that he only wants to lead a quiet life. The
point becomes clear if we contrast Phillotson with Casaubon
in Middlemarch: he never confronts Dorothea’s lack of
attraction to him and tries to forestall her happiness beyond
death. Phillotson goes through an ordeal of recognition
—‘bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition, and he felt as lonely as when he had not known
her’ [185]. Later, walking back to the house where he has
left her, he senses the ‘increasing obscurity of evening’.
Phillotson shares in the shadow of the field. ‘Feelings are
feelings’ means that what is good for God’s gardeners is not
good for his birds—sexual selection is as ruthless as natural
selection.
But this means also that he shares the voice in the dark.
Note that the split is effected by an exchange of writing. The
first sign of Phillotson’s willingness to negotiate is that he
does not want to ‘thwart’ her, and her final appeal (which
works) is for him to be ‘kind’, so that he is inserted into the
vocabulary of the resistance. One of the subtextual ironies
here is that Sue not only cites J. S. Mill but ‘your von
Humboldt’ who was, of course, the schoolmaster of Prussia.
Mill cites him as an authority for liberty but Arnold in Culture
and Anarchy tries by a circuitous argument to reenlist what
he calls, with characteristic bluff, ‘the most beautiful of
souls’ in the cause of culture against individuality; he points
out that von Humboldt organized education in Prussia after
he had written the text from which Mill (and Sue) quotes.
Hardy works the other way round—the text deschools the
schoolmaster. Though he sees Sue’s relationship with Jude
as ‘riddle’, he responds to its ‘curious tender solicitude’ and
feels it would be ‘inhuman’ to torture her any longer. These
are all words that we know have radical connotations in
Hardy. He goes on to say that he cannot defend his action
‘logically or religiously’ but has to act ‘by instinct and let
principles take care of themselves’. The instinct is a
response to a voice: ‘if a person who had blindly walked into
a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it if possible’.
The important point is that his instinct leads him to kindness
even though it thwarts his desire, and worse. Offering her
her desire, he loses his place. It is a strangely bitter irony
that the schoolmaster should be defended by the itinerant
gypsies.
But this is not merely sentimental decency—it becomes
for Phillotson the basis of a new social outlook. The instinct
may go against logic (for logically, as Gillingham says, it will
bring the house down) but it leads him to a kind of reason: ‘I
was, and am, the most old-fashioned man in the world on
the question of marriage—in fact I had never thought
critically about its ethics at all. But certain facts stared me
in the face, and I couldn’t go against them’ [193] (my
italics). On the one hand, logic, religion, the need to
‘harmonize’ [189] and on the other instinct, thinking
critically, facts. The instinct is not the product of a feeling—
the passion is still the other way round ‘to adorn her in
somebody else’s eyes’. Not to give in to the passion, as
Gillingham points out, would lead to a general domestic
disintegration. ‘The family would no longer be the social
unit.’ Phillotson in response goes through to the end: ‘I don’t
see why the woman and the children should not be the unit
without the man.’ He out Sues Sue. When Millicent Fawcett
later approached Hardy for his support for the suffrage, he
made it clear that he thought it a trivial change but that he
would support it because it might help to bring down the
whole repressive social fabric, notably the family.2 It is no
wonder that Phillotson cannot go on being a schoolmaster.
Mere decency demands he overthrow the social order.
His retreat from this position is carefully marked with the
inky blot of his line of reason. Note that he re-enters the
narrative by reading the account of the death of the children
and feeling pained and puzzled by it. He is updated by
Arabella, which signifies the return of the working-class
verge (pigs must be killed, and feelings are feelings). On his
return to the schoolroom he pictures Sue and thus there is a
return to images, or inadequate ideas.3 He is explained with
what is effectively a Gibbonian irony: ‘No man ever suffered
more inconvenience from his own charity, Christian or
Heathen … He had been knocked about from pillar to post at
the hands of the virtuous almost beyond endurance’ [290].
The regression is not a retreat to order but the reversal of a
reversal, just as Sue has not moved back to religion but
forward to religiosity (which is more modern even than
paganism and indeed a common enough fate of theoretic
unconventionality). Phillotson’s stand is ‘subverted by
feeling’ as feeling had subverted his previous position—he
‘makes use’ of Sue’s new views of marriage but does not
believe in them, but in his ‘wish’ for her. Moreover, he
vindicates her in exactly the terms that Hardy has pleaded
early on for Tess—‘it has done little more for her than
complete her education’. The reader is placed in a very
strange position here. Obviously no one is going to feel
anything but revulsion against Sue’s remarriage, but in
doing that the reader is not only aligning himself
sentimentally with Jude, but also with Gillingham, who wants
decency and order. Phillotson enlists Sue’s reaction and his
own liberalism in the cause of a return—not to order, since
the right order envisaged by Gillingham is that Sue should
settle down and marry Jude—but to a grotesque parody of it.
As her religion is absurd, so her remarriage is a masochistic
parody. And moreover, it is totally depersonalized. Hardy
makes it impossible to blame either of them. Both have paid
too heavily for their honesty and both are humiliated by the
wages of return. Of course, it is mostly degrading for the
woman but it is no more than a joyless self-relief for him.
Nothing mitigates the nauseating wrongness of Sue’s
return, and Hardy escalates the reader’s discomfort by
refusing to stop with the wedding and taking us to the
consummation, which is enacted in painful detail. It is made
worse by the sympathy we are forced to have with
Phillotson and by the fact that he had done nothing to force
the consummation. The detail is powerfully physical. He is
snoring and stops and she hopes for a minute that he is
dead; then she confesses to him, giving him the extra pain
he does not need, and in this atmosphere of mortification
she submits (her word is ‘supplicates’). Worse still,
Phillotson tries to dissuade her but in a sentence of
remarkable mutual humiliation says, ‘I owe you nothing
after those signs’, while she says, ‘It’s my duty.’ Licensed to
be loved on the premises, crude loving kindness has to be
left to look after itself. It is not silenced, however, even in
the hour of its deletion, for there is Widow Edlin (even her
title comes to seem significant) worried that ‘the little thing’
is disturbed by the wind and rain, recognizing that a
wedding funeral has taken place. The voice of the obscure
speaks out of the past, but of course speaks to no listener
so that it has no performative value, and is only available
because the novelist has written it down.

* * *

† From John Goode, “Hardy’s Fist,” in Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 141–42, 163–66. Page numbers in square
brackets refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. Not that we should underestimate that observation. The novel is not a series
of seemings in the sense that it deals merely with a world of consciousness.
On the contrary it is difficult to find equally accurate and internal
presentations of working-class life to compare with, let us say, the pig-killing
episode, and indeed the whole ‘world’ of the novel.
2. Goode refers here to Hardy’s letter of November 30, 1906, to Millicent
Fawcett, one of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, in which he
supplied his reasons for supporting votes for women: ‘I am in favour […]
because I think the tendency of the woman’s vote will be to break up the
present pernicious conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion,
illegitimacy, the stereotyped household (that it must be the unit of society),
the father of a woman’s child (that it is anybody’s business but the woman’s
own) […] slaughterhouses (that they should be dark dens of cruelty) & other
matters which I got into hot water for touching on many years ago.
I do not mean that I think all women, or even a majority, will actively press
some or any of the first-mentioned of these points, but that their being able
to assert themselves will loosen the tongues of men who have not liked to
 speak out on such matters while women have been their helpless
dependants’ (Letters of Thomas Hardy, vol. 3, pp. 238–39).
3. Here again Spinoza seems to be relevant, but it is difficult to establish how
carefully Hardy had read him. On the level of individual ‘experience,’
Spinoza’s seems to me the most nearly materialist account of the relation of
structure to agency, and this explains to some extent his attraction for writers
such as Eliot and Rutherford, who, without having recourse to historical
materialism, understood the impasse of Cartesian dualism.

MARJORIE GARSON
[Jude’s Idealism]†
Jude Fawley wants; Jude Fawley is wanting. We know Jude
through the rhythm of desire, repulsion, and renunciation
which constitutes his inner life; we know him through those
he wants, through Sue and Arabella and Christminster; and
we know them in terms of their ability or inability to fulfil his
desires. Jude is wanting: he is constituted in lack, defined
from the first pages of the novel as ‘a hungry soul in pursuit
of a full soul’. His emptiness is dramatized in the action—
even in the part-titles—of the novel, as he moves from place
to place in search of the fulfilment which continually eludes
him. Jude’s wanting provides the plot, the characters, and
the emotional tone of the novel.
Jude wants Sue, and he wants a university education.
Examination of Hardy’s manuscripts has shown that the
marriage problem was part of his conception of the novel
from the very beginning, and that in his first draft it was Sue
who was to have been the motivation for Jude’s desire to
visit Christminster. Though Phillotson later replaced Sue in
this capacity, there remain in the novel as it stands strong
links between Jude’s desire for Sue and his desire for
Christminster. Sue is living in the city of his dreams, and
reaching it involves discovering her. Desiring in her not only
the woman but the cultivation she embodies—the kind of
culture which exposure to Christminster has apparently
already given to her—Jude attributes to her many of the
values which he has attributed to the city, imagining them
both as bodiless, visionary presences, as shining forms
encircled by haloes of light. Jude is temperamentally
logocentric: he naïvely believes in the reality of the idealized
images he has constructed from inherited materials.
Christminster is to be the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation,
Sue is to be the haloed apparition in his aunt’s photograph.
However, both will remain hauntingly elusive: despite his
obsession about staying close to the university and to Sue,
Jude discovers that it does not necessarily help to be ‘on the
spot’ [10]. For the truth is that both the desired woman and
the desired city exist in their luminous purity only in Jude’s
imagination: by the very nature of his dreams, he is doomed
to disappointment.
What particularly marks this novel, indeed, is the tone of
what might be called ‘logocentric wistfulness’. Like many of
Hardy’s heroes, Jude is a reader, but a reader of printed
texts rather than of the signs of nature. The fact that it is
the Bible which lies behind the language and imagery of the
novel seems related to the stubbornness with which he
insists upon a transcendent reality behind words and signs.
And Jude’s author shares his logocentric desire. When Hardy
presents his protagonist as a Christ-figure, there may be a
degree of irony in the identification; but he treats Jude’s
analogous fantasies without disabling irony. Though we
know from the beginning that Jude is going to be mistaken
about Christminster and about Sue, we are to think more of
him for his idealism, and less of those beings which fail to
live up to his image of them. Christminster ought to be the
City of Light, and if it is not, it is the city which is to blame;
Sue ought to be ‘worthy’ of Jude’s devotion. Both equally
deserve his suggestively worded reproach to Sue: ‘you are
… not so nice in your real presence as you are in your
letters’ [136].
 Indeed, what Jude wants is implicit in his view of
language. As a child, Jude imagines that there is a key which
will render the whole of language transparent—undo Babel.
When he finds that no such key exists, that he cannot
master the whole, he starts to plug away at the parts. But
his vision of identity is rather endorsed than otherwise, and
the fantasy of wholeness underlies the text: the desire for
magical translation into a state of pure presence, the desire
to be lifted above competing voices, absorbed into a unified
community. This dream seems to be presented as a
legitimate desire, a vision betrayed by the social
organization of contemporary Oxford and by Victorian views
of marriage.
Jude’s Christminster is created for him by words, by
printed books. Although the notion of a blessed place is
suggested by Phillotson, the shape that place takes in his
imagination derives from images which are essentially
literary. Jude knows Christminster through the Bible, as the
heavenly Jerusalem; through his study of Latin, as his ‘Alma
Mater’ [34]; and through the written words of her sons, who
speak to him of ‘her ineffable charm’ [69] more kindly and
clearly than Christminster ever speaks in person. These
patriarchal texts testify with an authority which implies the
reality of what they describe. But it is clear from the opening
pages of the novel that the very terms in which Jude has
conceived his desire preclude its fulfilment.
The famous opening to the second part of the novel,
which has Jude listening to the ‘ghostly presences’ [67] of
Christminster, suggests why this is so. These voices of
Oxford seem stilted, ‘got up’ by Hardy, but the very
awkwardness of the passage is part of its meaning. The
episode raises in paradigmatic form some of the issues of
autobiographical fiction, since the quotations Jude
remembers have of course been culled from Hardy’s own
reading. Hardy’s awareness of their miscellaneous, even
arbitrary character is reflected in the way the narrator
accounts for them: they are supposed to be from ‘a book or
two [Jude] had brought with him concerning the sons of the
University’ [68], evidently tourist-guide anthologies of
‘purple passages’. The attribution suggests that Jude is not
as well read as Hardy (the quotations are not collected by
him) but on the other hand absolves Jude of the kind of
jejune self-satisfaction implied by their assemblage. The
passage dramatizes the alienation it presents, its uneasy
tone a perfectly accurate register of both the pride and the
defensiveness of the autodidact. Its ironies make clear that
print can provide no unmediated, unproblematical contact
with culture as a whole or with the mind or spirit of the
writers of the past.
Indeed, the episode raises the question of the relationship
between the written and the spoken word, for though their
resonant words seem ‘spoken by them in muttering
utterances’ [68], Jude has been introduced to the ‘voices’
through the printed pages ‘he had just been conning’ [68],
and their rhetoric (even that of Sir Robert Peel’s Corn Law
speech) is very much écriture. Jude dreams of appropriating
what these voices represent, but they undo him even as
they address him: as he listens to them, he begins to feel
more ghostly, less substantial, than they. Each of these
writers uses the first person pronoun; each one has a
powerful ego and a confident, totalizing vision of human
experience. Yet, speaking together, the voices depict a
Christminster which must remain incoherent, not only
because (as Jude himself realizes) it has always generated a
wide range of conflicting opinions but also because it is
constituted by the (inevitably) fragmentary reading of an
(inevitably) partially educated individual. Jude seeks to be
made whole, but it is clear that his very vision of
Christminster must preclude the consummation he desires.
What Jude does for a living is relevant to these issues. A
country stonemason who practises his craft ‘holistically’, he
can turn his hand to a number of tasks, in contrast to the
urban workers, who master one technique only. Jude’s
versatility recalls while it parodies Ruskin’s vision of Gothic.
The values Ruskin imputes to the old architecture are seen
as illusory, yet the presence in the novel of bastardized
Victorian Gothic nevertheless implies degrees of
authenticity and hints at a nostalgia for origin which the text
at other times seems to debunk. (At times Hardy seems to
suggest that Jude, in desiring a university education, is
betraying a kind of Ruskinian vision of honest
craftsmanship.) It is emblematic of this contradiction that
Sue should dismiss the Gothic style as ‘barbaric’ [249], and
yet at the same time be ‘sentimentally opposed to the
horrors of over-restoration’ [244]; it is not entirely clear
whether this is supposed to be one of her many
contradictions (as the narrator’s adverb ‘sentimentally’
would seem to suggest) or whether the inconsistencies in
Hardy’s feelings shape her ‘character’ (for the noun ‘horrors’
may not be Sue’s but the narrator’s).
For Hardy seems to endorse Jude’s impulses by showing
them as instinctively directed towards wholeness, while at
the same time presenting that wholeness as an impossible
dream. Is it because Jude is a working man, or simply
because he is a human being, that he has to begin his
apprenticeship laboriously and fragmentedly, by learning to
shape one letter at a time? The process is analogous to the
way he has to struggle with the heavy medium of the
classical languages, alone and without help. The dream is of
a whole which will at some moment add up to more than the
sum of its parts, which will become monumental,
permanent, resonant with interconnected meaning; which
will make the individual whole, and unite him creatively with
an organic community. But I would argue that the text is not
entirely clear about whether it is Jude’s class position which
victimizes him, or whether this dream is by definition a
hopeless one.
 In my reading, the text is shaped even more radically by
Hardy’s feelings about the body than by his feelings about
social class. It seems to me that Jude’s desire—for a
wholeness of a quasi-spiritual type, a wholeness which
completely transcends the body, does not depend upon the
body—is intrinsically unrealizable, and that the class theme
in the novel is as much ‘vehicle’ as it is ‘tenor’. Take for
example Jude’s occupation. The facts that he, like Hardy’s
father, is a stone-mason and that his dusty working clothes
make him invisible to the upper-class undergraduates who
pass him on the street suggest that it is his class position
which is decisive. On the other hand, there is something
idiosyncratically Hardyan about the way Jude’s craft is
presented. It is suggestive that Jude is a worker in stone, the
deadest and most intractable of materials, and that he sees
himself as in the business of supplying dead bodies, helping
to provide ‘the carcases that contained the scholar souls’
[31]—for while this ought to be a perfectly legitimate aim,
and would be in Ruskin’s terms, it is one which, in Hardy’s
world, cannot be achieved with impunity.
Embodiment means death; stone itself means death. His
work chills Jude and makes him vulnerable to the lung
infection which eventually kills him; the dust marks him and
makes him invisible to those who look through his body as
through a pane of glass. But these literal details only mask
the deeper, figurative import of the stonemasonry. Its
implications are crystallized in the famous moment when
Jude cuts into a stone the word THITHER [63]—an inscription
which, we know, will remain to mock him. The act of
embodying an aim in a word, and cutting that word in stone,
is perfectly emblematic of Jude’s logocentric desire. His aim
is to make the word real—to ensure its fulfilment—by giving
it a body. But in Hardy’s world the opposite happens. When
the word falls into matter, becomes incarnate in paper or
stone, it partakes of the exigencies of material existence,
and becomes sinister, mocking, dangerous. The common
(‘touch-wood’) superstition that expressing satisfaction at a
situation can reverse it is given an idiosyncratic slant by
Hardy, who suggests that the real danger lies in inscribing
the word, giving it a material body. The incarnate word takes
the place of what it signifies, precludes its fulfilment.
Incarnation means betrayal in this novel: to give or to take a
body is to fall away from reality, to be involved in death.

† From Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 152–58. © Marjorie Garson 1991.
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Page numbers in square
brackets refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition. The author’s
notes have been omitted.

VICTOR LUFTIG
[Jude and Sue: “True Comrades”]†
* * *
During their period as “true comrades” disguised as
spouses, Hardy has Sue join Jude at work “to see what
assistance she could render, and also because they liked to
be together.” Though they are at work repairing an image of
the Ten Commandments, the scene does not partake of
Sue’s rhetoric of religious fellowship—as adulterers they are
in violation of one of those commandments anyway, and
along with religion the family idioms drop away too.1
Instead, Hardy emphasizes how Sue’s well-honed skills
contribute to a moment of perfectly shared work:
standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which
she was nevertheless timid at mounting, [Sue] began
painting in the letters of the first Table while he set
about mending a portion of the second. She was quite
pleased at her powers; she had acquired them in the
 days she painted illuminated texts for the church-fitting
shop at Christminster. Nobody seemed likely to disturb
them; and the pleasant twitter of birds, and rustle of
October leafage, came in through an open window, and
mingled with their talk. [244]
Twenty years earlier, Hardy had imaged such cooperation
as a rare basis for successful marriage, like Gabriel Oak and
Bathsheba Everdene’s, in Far From the Madding Crowd. He
had complained that “this good-fellowship—camaraderie—
usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is
unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the
sexes, because men and women associate, not in their
labours, but in their pleasures merely.” Though Gabriel and
Bathsheba could demonstrate friendship only as an element
“superadded” to the completed fact of romance, the novel
elsewhere confronted the absence of an independent idiom
for extramarital friendship. When her spurned suitor,
Boldwood, challenges her, “Do you like me, or do you
respect me?”, Bathsheba responds: “I don’t know—at least, I
cannot tell you. It is difficult for a woman to define her
feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to
express theirs.”2
In Jude, Hardy uses “comradeship,” a standard Victorian
term for marital affection, to label the missing element in
Jude and Arabella’s errant marriage [60].3 Neither that man-
made term (etymologically associated with room-mates) nor
“good-fellowship” nor any other satisfies Sue in her struggle
to name the extramarital relation she desires; but at work,
Hardy suggests, Jude and Sue’s “talk” can become natural,
even indistinguishable from “the pleasant twitter of birds.”
Here, when Sue and Jude are not negotiating a name for
their relationship, the narrator can represent cooperation as
the center of their extramarital affinity, in a scene that
maintains their defiance of rather than assimilation in
marriage.4
 At Jude the Obscure’s most optimistic stage, Hardy gives
emphasis to an element of the New Woman’s life Allen had
hardly mentioned: the tantalizing aspects of The Woman
Who Did had gone far to obscure any suspicion that what
the woman had done was to work. Jude the Obscure figures
as “true comradeship” an extramarital relation that includes
both sex and work. It is the kind of scene Elaine Scarry has
celebrated in her brilliant account of the way Hardy
inscribes their work onto the bodies of his characters:
That [Hardy’s] most radical portraits of the man-
materials relation so consistently occur in the context
of scenes of human desire and courtship perhaps
expresses Hardy’s sense that one does, in desiring a
person, desire the whole world bodied forth in that
person, or to phrase it in another way, one loves not
just the person but the world out into which the person
projects and inscribes himself or herself. At the same
time, however, the context of courtship seems intended
to invite the recognition that there is not only between
two human beings but between man and his materials
an extraordinary intimacy and comradeship, even a
wholly asexual love, that each regularly enters the
interior of the other, that they sometimes wound each
other, but that they also habitually speak on one
another’s behalf, each routinely expressing the other’s
hidden attributes and unarticulated vulnerabilities.5
“They were not, however, to be left thus snug and
peaceful for long,” are Hardy’s next words after the
description of Jude and Sue’s happy “talk.” Resigned that
immoral acts and moralistic conventions must always
intrude, Hardy in his novels allows the context of desire and
courtship to frustrate the kind of mutuality Scarry describes.
To exemplify the way Hardy puts “the body … at risk,”
Scarry herself refers to the way Tess D’Urberville’s body is
“altered” by her “encounter with Alec”: acknowledging that
“this particular alteration [Tess’s pregnancy] may belong to
the realm of desire rather than work,” Scarry notes that “the
encounter is between an employee and her employer … and
what happens to her is (as is routinely recognized in the
twentieth century and as Hardy deeply understood) a
hazard of the workplace, an industrial accident.”6 The vision
of work that would admit affection and yet avert such
accidents would surely require “an extraordinary intimacy
and comradeship,” if not “a wholly asexual love.” Feminist
efforts on behalf of heterosexual “friendship” had been
motivated by just such a hope. But the predominance of
desire and courtship bars that possibility from Hardy’s
fiction.
For even Hardy’s investment in Jude and Sue’s grand
cooperative moment may belong “to the realm of desire
rather than work,” and may reflect personal wish fulfillment
more than social vision. Critics have long recognized Jude
and Sue as embodying aspects of Hardy’s relationship with
Florence Henniker, whom he called “preeminently the child
of the Shelleyan tradition,” and with whom he had co-
written a published story—but whom he had apparently
failed to seduce. Jude the Obscure reflects above all Hardy’s
willingness to adopt utter resignation when unable to
preserve heterosexual relations in just the way he desired.
In his poem “Wessex Heights,” he wrote of Henniker:
As for one rare fair woman, I am not but a thought of
hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that
she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did
not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let
her go.7
Hardy’s peevish willingness to “let her go” was
subsequently belied by another thirty years of close
acquaintance. His tone in “Wessex Heights” has affinities
with Robert Browning’s dismissal of Julia Wedgwood and
with lines written even more smugly in Hardy’s own period
by fellow-novelist Samuel Butler:
… like and love are far removed;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell
That though I loved her in a certain sort,
Yet did I love wisely but not well.8
Butler’s sonnet jokingly celebrates his failure to resolve
matters much like the ones over which Hardy had let Sue
and Jude agonize; slightly less caustic, Hardy’s poem
nevertheless relishes his having smoothly recovered from
love unexpressed. Such smug dismissal might obscure the
frustration of thwarted attraction. Hardy had envisioned a
brief private retreat—for Jude and Sue in a church, for
himself and Henniker “At an Inn” (as imagined in the poem
of that title). But unable to see how such a relationship
could hold, Hardy then banished its realization to the
unforeseeable future—to a time “fifty, a hundred years”
later, when others, as Sue says, would “act and feel worse
than we”—and “let it go” for now, in fin-de-siècle
resignation, as untenable. “It is a serious lack,” as Christine
Brooke-Rose has said. “For this of all relationships,” she
adds, “where so much depends on that mysterious quality
called companionship (which is what Sue wanted) the
imaginative effort should have been made.”9 Hardy not only
refuses such effort, but also preempts its possibility.
Shortly before the publication of Jude, Hardy had asked in
a public symposium on gender relations “whether
civilisation can escape the humiliating indictment that, while
it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, in
literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never
succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory
scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.”10 Jude the
Obscure demonstrates how even the most sustained
treatments of “friendship” may, while claiming to
authenticate it, ultimately betray it. Hardy could fantasize
for himself a homely, temporary, private escape, and in the
process depict and even enact heterosexual cooperation.
But if he couldn’t have it all his way, the deal was off: he
would mark friendship a silent thing doomed.

* * *

† From Victor Luftig, “Friendship and New Women,” in Seeing Together:

Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing, from Mill to Woolf (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 116–19. Copyright © 1993 by the
Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Used by permission of
Stanford UP. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the print version of this
Norton Critical Edition.
1. For Hardy’s use of “the language of theology,” see Raymond Chapman, The
Language of Thomas Hardy (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 63–65. For the
observation about the scene’s religious irony, I am grateful to Regenia
Gagnier.
2. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (originally published in 1874).
Hardy’s comment on the limits of camaraderie closely parallels J. S. Mills’s
comment that men and women rarely relate in the way of “two friends of the
same sex who are much associated in daily life” in The Subjection of Women
[1869].
3. Ralph Elliott discusses the nineteenth-century use of “comradeship” to
describe the basis of happy marriages in Thomas Hardy’s English (Malden,
MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1984), pp. 319–20. But see the
OED’s suggestion that “comrade” was less likely to be applied to women.
4. Hardy made explicit his objections to marriage in his Postscript to Jude.
5. Elaine Scarry, “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century
Novelists,” Representations 3 (Summer 1983): 90–123 (106).
6. Scarry, “Work and the Body,” 95.
7. “Wessex Heights,” first published 1914 but with the date 1896; see Gibson,
Complete Poems, p. 319. For another tale that incorporates Shelley and
Henniker, see Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman” (1894). Kevin Moore sees Mrs.
Henniker becoming, “as Sue Florence Bridehead […] a representative figure
for all weak ‘Epipsychidions’ who dissemble a Shelleyan love to which they
are not wholly committed” (The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic
Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: New York University
Press, 1990), p. 252.
 8. Samuel Butler, “Remorse (a),” Note-Books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry
Festing Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), p. 424.
9. Christine Brooke-Rose, “Ill Wit and Sick Tragedy: Jude the Obscure,” in Lance
St. John Butler, Alternative Hardy (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 37–38.
[For “At an Inn,” see here.]
10. “The Tree of Knowledge” [Here].

JOHN R. DOHENY
[In Defence of Arabella]†
* * *
Jude is also a desperate snob who insists that Arabella is
beneath him in sensitivity, intelligence, and sophistication,
while remaining attractive and desirable sexually for a time.
In other words there is much of Angel Clare in him, and
perhaps some of those aristocratic ancestors of Tess whom
Hardy castigates for seducing or raping village girls who
were vulnerable to them because of their inferior positions.
However, Arabella is not inferior to Jude—whatever he tells
himself—and she is not dependent upon him in any way
except in passionate love, and she can handle that well
enough. In spite of Jude, even sometimes in spite of his own
comments, Hardy creates a character in Arabella who
reaches full development. Instead of functioning as a
novelistic device, an obstacle in Jude’s way, Arabella
introduces a different and contrasting view of life.
In part because Arabella’s character is fully developed,
Jude becomes a fully rounded character himself in the novel
rather than an extension of the author. We see him and his
ideas all around; his ideas are tested against the reality of
living, where they have less chance of standing
unquestioned, and they don’t survive the test very well. We
see them in relation to Arabella’s values, ideas, and general
position (and at other times to those of other characters),
and this allows Jude’s character to develop in ways which he
doesn’t recognize himself. The process makes him a more
complex, more human character however less heroic he
appears.
Had Jude been seeking a decently healthy, financially
secure, and satisfying life, even one in which he could
indulge his pleasures in books and in learning ancient
languages for their own sake, his marriage to Arabella had
prospects which were promising. She was so overwhelmed
by Jude that she was determined that he should have her,
that he should marry her. She responds to Anny’s early
congratulations for the beginnings of her success with Jude
in what Hardy describes as ‘a curiously low, hungry tone of
latent sensuousness,’
I’ve got him to care for me: yes! But I want him to more
than care for me; I want him to have me—to marry me!
I must have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of
man I long for. I shall go mad if I can’t give myself to
him altogether! I felt I should when I first saw him! (Pt I,
Ch. 7) [44]
She is a fully sensual, sexual woman, as no other woman
in the novel is, perhaps as no woman except Eustacia Vye is
in any Hardy novel. She is a good manager, realistic about
the requirements for a decent life, and accomplished in
many tasks including raising pigs, tending a bar, and
managing finances when they are scarce. Most of all, she is
prepared to get on with the life they have committed
themselves to. The absurdity of the marriage vows never
bothers her because she recognizes the marriage as a
living, sexual partnership just as Widow Edlin does and did
in her own marriage. It is a commitment to live together for
mutual pleasure, support, and gain, and what she expects
from Jude is the same commitment and the ability to stick to
his trade. She is also independent enough and strong
enough to leave Jude when she has decided that the
marriage is not a good one. And since she is able to do this
so easily and with no dire consequences, she introduces into
the novel, both here and continuously whenever she
reappears, not only a different set of values from those of
Jude and Sue but a commentary on theirs which changes
our view of the various manifestations of their dilemma.
Arabella’s practicality versus Jude’s squeamishness and
sentimentality, which he justifies as a version of being kind,
a sort of merciful high mindedness, can be seen quite
clearly in the scene where they must butcher their own pig
because the weather has prevented the butcher from
reaching them in time (Pt I, Ch. 10) [54–56].

* * *
Since it is too busy for them to talk in the bar, Arabella
invites him to wait for her to get off work. She can arrange
to leave early, at nine. Jude agrees saying they should
arrange something, but Arabella replies, ‘O bother
arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything’; then Jude
changes to a need to ‘know a thing or two’. While he is
waiting, Jude works up his honourable reasons for a strict
adherence to rule, and he thinks to himself:
Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality
of his sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella’s word
was absolutely untrustworthy, he thought there might
be some truth in her implication that she had not
wished to disturb him, and had really supposed him
dead. However, there was only one thing now to be
done, and that was to play a straightforward part, the
law being the law, and the woman between whom and
himself there was no more unity than between east and
west being in the eye of the Church one person with
him. (Pt III, Ch. 8) [150]
This is a magnificent passage of convoluted self-deception
and rationalization for waiting around for Arabella, and a
typical example of the way Jude’s mind works. First, had he
genuinely wanted to avoid Arabella, he needn’t have
approached her. Even after speaking to her, he could quite
simply have wished her well and agreed to continue to go
their separate ways. Arabella gives every indication that this
is her own wish, though Jude’s persistence seems to have
perked her interest. Jude insists upon a meeting and
discussion, first for one purpose and then for another. And
when Arabella agrees, he must also work himself up to the
righteous key and present himself as bound, even trapped,
by the law and the eye of the Church, neither of which has
any interest in him at all as has been obvious from the first
and will also be obvious when he obtains his divorce from
Arabella. The reason why Jude must convince himself of this
honourable, straight, and honest procedure becomes
immediately clear: ‘Having to meet Arabella here, it was
impossible to meet Sue at Alfredston as he had promised. At
every thought of this a pang had gone through him; but the
conjuncture could not be helped.’ He thinks this to himself
and goes on to speculate that ‘perhaps’ Arabella was an
‘intervention to punish him for his unauthorized love’ (Pt III,
Ch. 8) [151]. Jude’s capacity for self-justification through
self-deception is indeed heroically large!
The only plausible explanation for Jude’s persistence here
is that he does want to spend time with Arabella to provide
some compensation for the loss of Sue, but he can’t bring
himself to know it since it would tarnish his own idea of
himself. What follows when they do meet can only be
explained in these terms. When Arabella meets him at nine,
she takes his arm and asks him what arrangements he
wants to come to; he answers, ‘none in particular’ and
begins to think of Sue again, and suggests that he should
have gone back to Marygreen because his aunt is ill. In spite
of what seems an effort to back off, when Arabella proposes
they take the train to Aldbrickham and spend the night
together, Jude readily agrees but in such a way as to put the
responsibility for it onto Arabella: he says, ‘As you like.’ He
is successful then in spending a night of conjugal pleasure
with Arabella without being responsible for it himself.1
Returning the next morning to Christminster, Jude asks
Arabella again what she meant when she told him as they
were getting out of bed that morning that she had
something to tell him but didn’t because he wouldn’t
promise to keep it a secret. When he does promise not to
tell it around, she informs him of her marriage in Australia,
and Jude grows angry because she didn’t tell him of what he
sees as her ‘crime’ before they spent the night together. Is
this a suggestion that he would not have spent the night in
sexual pleasure with her had she told him this? Of course,
he has no answer because the question is a means of
keeping the active responsibility shifted away from himself
toward Arabella to avoid feeling guilty about it and about
missing the appointment with Sue. In other words, it allows
him later to say to Sue that he couldn’t help it, a favourite
phrase for them both. Arabella is less bound by conscience
and is a match for Jude. ‘Crime! Pooh. They don’t think
much of such as that over there! Lots of ’em do it.… Well, if
you take it like that I shall go back to him! He was very fond
of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable
as any married couple in the Colony!’ (Pt III, Ch. 9) [153].
The whole scene deserves careful reading, for it reveals a
great deal about Jude.
Having tested out the possibility of some sort of return to
Jude, Arabella decides that it isn’t a good idea and makes it
clear to Jude that she wants nothing more than the night of
pleasure from him. Jude, on the other hand, feels
tremendous guilt for his night of pleasure. Since he cannot
feel ‘resentment towards her’ he can only expiate for his
great sin by patronizingly pitying Arabella ‘while he
contemned her’, hence the emphasis on her ‘crime’. Sue
also makes much of the crime later on (Pt III, Ch. 9) [154–
58].
 Without his full conscious knowledge Arabella did bring
his sexual feelings into full play, and in spite of his feelings
of degradation, or perhaps because of them, he sits beside
Sue in the train comparing the ‘small, tight, apple-like
convexities of her bodice’ with ‘Arabella’s amplitudes’. Sue,
whom Jude now finds more attractive in her nervous
evasions than he did Arabella’s straightforward directness,
has come up from Marygreen to find him and to indirectly
scold him for not meeting her the night before. She is
described as ‘bodeful’, ‘anxious’, ‘her little mouth nervous,
and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry … not far
from a sob’ because, she says, ever so indirectly, that she
fears that Jude might have forgotten his promise to her
never to get drunk again and, suffering because she was not
there anymore, he might have gone on a binge again.
Jude is, as usual, thrilled by her attention and concern,
seeing her as ‘a good angel’ come ‘to hunt [him] up, and
deliver [him]’ (Pt III, Ch. 9) [154]. So far as I know, no one
has taken up this need on Jude’s part to re-enact the care of
a lost mother. In spite of the fact that she made him deeply
miserable by marrying Phillotson (as she will soon make
Phillotson deeply miserable by leaving him for Jude), Jude
looks upon her as his loved one, ‘in his tender thought the
sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever
had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature
that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs’,
and this makes him feel ‘heartily ashamed of his earthliness
in spending the hours he had spent in Arabella’s company’.
And, we can add for him, in bed with her (Pt III, Ch. 9) [154].
The only possible relationship with a woman on an equal
footing and in full adult relation for Jude would be with
Arabella, but that is clearly not what he wants. He prefers
the nervous, anxious, neurotic relationship he can and does
establish with Sue.

* * *
† From John R. Doheny, “Characterization in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The
Function of Arabella,” in Reading Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit
(London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 64–65, 75–78, 81. Page numbers in square
brackets refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. As an indication of Jude’s eagerness to get Arabella into bed, he ignores the
danger of Arabella’s offer to go to Marygreen with him to visit his Aunt
Drusilla who is ill, especially when we remember that Sue is also likely to be
visiting Drusilla.

MICHAEL HOLLINGTON
[“Progress” and Disruption: Little Father
Time]†
Jude the Obscure seems to ask whether the present must be
seen simply as a continuation of the past, or whether some
radical break with the past has already taken place—to
usher in the era of ‘modernity’, for instance—or is about to,
or whether such a break can be wrought by individual or
collective human agency. On the one hand, in the novel time
and history are conceived of as ‘story’ on a grandly
continuous scale, involving the whole sweep of the past,
back to Adam and Eve and beyond, inscribed in oral legend
and biblical myth as well as chronicle. On the other hand,
there is accelerated modern or ‘railway’ time, presented as
a more precise, rational and abstract medium which
impinges in new ways upon the lives of modern people. The
innumerable train journeys in this novel, and the fatal
consequences of missing trains, point to the fact that life
appears now to be governed by a new timetable. It is Sue,
as we shall see, who seems to embody and promote
‘modern’ time with particular clarity, as for instance when
she informs Jude of her intention to marry Phillotson: ‘it may
strike you as being accelerated (as the railway companies
say of their trains)’ [140].
 These two contrasting conceptions of time and history
clearly confront one another in the early passage describing
Farmer Troutham’s field, from which Jude is meant to shoo
rooks, and analyzed by John Goode as a proleptic emblem of
the ‘no thoroughfare’ that lies ahead on his, path in life,
rendering the completion of his Bildung an impossibility
(1988, 147–148). The field has been freshly ploughed,
‘depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent
months, though in every clod and stone there really lingered
associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from
ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds’
[14]. There appears to be temporal impasse here as well as
spiritual—no way back, it seems, from modernity to a richer
historical semiotics in which story and history are
intertwined. The passage echoes an even earlier one about
the demolition of the church at Marygreen, decided upon by
‘a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down
from London and back in a day’ [12]. Such day trips depend,
of course, upon a new sense of time governed by railway
timetables.
Sue Bridehead is the character in the novel who most
clearly seeks to side with modernity against antiquity, and
thus to sanction such obliterations of architectural heritage.
Her attitudes towards architecture, indeed—which take as
their motto the cry that ‘ “The cathedral has had its day!” ’:
she prefers to sit with Jude in the railway station, ‘ “the
centre of town life now” ’ [111]—seem emblematic of her
desire to achieve ‘new womanhood’. ‘ “Wardour is Gothic
ruins—and I hate Gothic!” ’ she exclaims in vehement
rejection of Jude’s proposal for an outing there [113],
explaining elsewhere that ‘ “Gothic is barbaric art, after all”
’ [249].1
She presents herself, then, as a rationalist opponent of
superstition and an ironist about tradition, whom Jude more
than once describes as a ‘ “Voltairean” ’ (for example, at
[126]). These attitudes consort with her views on ‘story’—
most clearly perhaps in her sceptical views of the Bible as
legend and fairy tale. She scoffs at an itinerant showman’s
educational model of ancient Jerusalem as mere fable: ‘
“this model, elaborate as it is, is a very imaginary
production. How does anybody know what Jerusalem was
like in the time of Christ? I am sure this man doesn’t” ’ [90].
She makes a new version of the New Testament for herself,
historicizing it in logical and chronological sequence: ‘ “I
altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels
into separate brochures, and re-arranging them in
chronological order as written, beginning the book with
Thessalonians” ’ [126]. And she mocks allegorical readings
of Scripture: ‘ “what I insist on is, that to explain such verses
as this: ‘Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest amongst
women?’ by the note ‘The Church professeth her faith’ is
supremely ridiculous!” ’ [126].
There are clearly some palpable hits here, amongst the
general negative drift of Sue’s scorn. But the novel’s ironies
turn against her when it comes to the positive pole—that is
to her say, her many proclamations of having herself
progressed beyond, or being about to progress beyond, a
historically outmoded phase of civilization. The hollowness
of her early attitudes towards Jude, for instance—‘it was
evident that her cousin deeply interested her, as one might
be interested in a man puzzling out his way along a
labyrinth from which one had one’s self escaped’ [113]—is
laid bare in the ironic hint of style indirect libre, and the
unconvincing rhetoric in the repeated use of ‘one’ and
‘one’s self’ that this entails. Yet she sees herself, not just as
an individual, but as a generalized harbinger and
representative of coming historic change, an angel of the
avant-garde who can foresee a future that will pour scorn on
the present: ‘ “when people of a later age look back upon
the barbaric customs and superstitions of the times that we
have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!” ’ [176].
She goes on to announce the arrival of the new era in the
ironic setting of the ‘great Wessex Agricultural Show’: ‘ “I
feel that we have returned to Greek joyousness, and have
blinded ourselves to sickness and sorrow, and have
forgotten what twenty-five centuries have taught the race
since their time” ’ [242].

* * *
In the first half of the novel, versions of a kind of symbolic
‘progress’ narrative based on allegorical texts like The
Pilgrim’s Progress, and consorting with ideas or delusions of
organic growth, continuity, and Benjamin’s ‘weak
Messianism’, hold sway. In the second half, with the decay
of such hopeful prospects, these tend to recede, and a
significantly different mode makes its appearance with the
figure of Father Time. It is much more flamboyantly
allegorical, not in the least natural, but thoroughly artificial
and mechanical—clumsy, indeed, to many critics of Hardy,
not only those who write from the orthodox perspective of
‘classic realism’. * * * The new mode is tragic rather than
‘comic’ (in that word’s medieval sense, as applied to such
‘progress’ narratives as Dante’s, with its teleological drive
towards a positive outcome). It emphasizes not only
discontinuity but violence, destruction, and apparent
hopelessness, although as I shall argue, it perhaps contains
the germ of a stronger Messianism.2

* * *
His parting words, of course, are: Done because we are too
menny [272]. In ironic tragic register, Father Time cyclically
recapitulates and re-presents with renewed intensity those
images of the fate of the ‘superfluous man’ (in its Russian
sense of alienated from all meaning and purpose in life,
after Turgenev’s 1850 Diary of a Superfluous Man, as well as
others) that had been so prominent in Jude’s youthful
meditations on his ‘unnecessary life’, as he watches the
couplings of earthworms [16], or, lying near a pigsty, in his
‘feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded
one’ [17]. There is absolutely no progress here, then, and in
narrating the son’s repetition of the father’s fate the novel
shows that history has got dramatically worse rather than
better. The illusions that Jude clings on to—that, although ‘
“an outsider to the end of my days” ’ [266], his ambition to
study at Christminster might be vicariously fulfilled by his
son in the ‘natural march of Progress’—are bitterly
repudiated. ‘ “I’d rather not!” ’ is Father Time’s Bartlebyan
reply: ‘ “I troubled ’em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I
wish I hadn’t been born” ’ [267].
Yet despite the pervasive gloom of Jude the Obscure, it
would be a mistake, I think, to read it simply as a document
of fin-de-siècle pessimism. It is important first to stress that
it clearly affirms the existence of certain positive values and
ideals, which are essentially this-worldly—they imagine a
saner and juster world, defined chiefly in the negative, as
that which this world at present is not—and repudiate the
kind of transcendence that simply gives up on the here-and-
now. Jude, in his commentary on Browning’s ‘soldier saints
who, row on row, / Burn upward each to his point of bliss’,
makes the point in a memorable way by remarking that his
point of bliss ‘ “is not upward, but here” ’ [195]. * * *
Furthermore, paradoxical as it may seem, I do not think it
out of the question to consider the tragic and destructive
figure of Father Time as a possible negative term in a
dynamic process that might lead to historic change. Though
some late nineteenth-century writers simply emphasize
degeneracy, others see at least the possibility of turning
death-in-life into life-in-death. * * * In England and Ireland,
Lawrence and Joyce were amongst those who were shortly
to re-examine conventional notions of tragedy from a * * *
perspective * * * that asked whether it might be the
necessary condition of decisive change and renewal. The
fact that at the level of artistic representation Father Time is
the one figure in Jude the Obscure who effects a major
discursive breach with the conventions of nineteenth-
century realism may carry ideological implications that go
beyond the purely aesthetic sphere.
At any rate, one can speculate what Benjamin might have
thought of Hardy’s use of allegory in this novel. Might he
have seen it, indeed, as dialectical strategy? It was only
through indirection, and Hegelian dialectical cunning, he felt
in The Arcades Project, that the modern consumer/flâneur
might be woken from his sleep of fantasy. Showing how
unlikely it is that Jude and Sue’s ‘weak Messianism’ could
generate such decisive change, the novel’s negative, grimly
ironic patterns of thought and feeling may form part of a
dialectic that similarly gestures towards alternative
strategies for effecting historical change.

† From Michael Hollington, “Story, History, Allegory: Some Ironies of Jude the
Obscure from a Benjamin Perspective,” in Thomas Hardy and Contemporary
Literary Studies, ed. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (Hampshire, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 104–05, 108, 113–15. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the print version of
this Norton Critical Edition.
1. Sue unconsciously echoes the definition of Goth in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary as
‘one not civilized, one deficient in general knowledge, a barbarian’. * * *
2. By ‘weak Messianism’ Benjamin means a prosaically limited view of paradise
on earth at the end of time ‘coloured by the time to which the course of our
existence has assigned us’.

SIMON GATRELL
From Coloured Clothes†
* * *
Hardy turned again to the opposition of light and dark, of
white and black, when he evolved the dress-structure of
Jude the Obscure, but where in A Laodicean the pattern had
served merely to imply that Paula distinguished deliberately
or instinctively between Somerset and de Stancy, in Jude
the Obscure the distinction goes to the root of Hardy’s
characterisation. For in this novel Hardy turned, as he had in
some of his earlier novels, to stress the relationship
between clothes and the body that wears them (this is not
to say that he ignores the relationship elsewhere—it just
doesn’t come centre-stage in quite the same way); and the
body displayed or hidden by the clothes leads, as directly as
anywhere in his writing, to considerations of its sexual
potential. * * *
The groundwork of the pattern of colour in dress is that
when we know what Sue is wearing, it is light and often in
motion, when we know what Arabella is wearing it is heavy
and dark, when we know what Jude is wearing it is light for
work and dark for leisure. These decisions were not hard for
Hardy to make. He conceived Sue as a ‘pretty, liquid-eyed,
light-footed young woman’, a phrase in which even the
alliteration expresses motion and lightness of being [78].
Arabella on the other hand is a woman of amplitudes,
slightly coarse, well-rooted in material things. That Jude
changes into his suit after work marks him out in Hardy’s
world as an ambitious and self-educated provincial artisan,
when compared with the average rural mechanic (who, the
narrator of The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) suggests, remains
a mechanic twenty-four hours of the day). But naturally
there are purposeful variations and transformations of this
simple arrangement.
In fact, while Sue is in Christminster, it is her body in
motion rather than her clothes that both the narrator and
Jude are preoccupied by. Even before he has spoken to her,
Jude sits in a church ‘watching her pretty shoulders, her
easy, curiously nonchalant, risings, and sittings, and her
perfunctory genuflexions’, and as a consequence he admits
to himself that ‘his interest in her had shown itself to be
unmistakably of a sexual kind’ [82]. It is both the grace of
her movements and the shape of her pretty shoulders that
force this recognition upon him. He responds to the play of
her body within her clothes, for her pretty shoulders are
certainly covered by a couple of layers of fabric, which both
hide and reveal their shape—it is the hide-and-seek that
holds the erotic charge.
In the same chapter Hardy provides her with another
gesture that invites us to think of her body beneath her
dress: ‘a young girl entered the stone-mason’s yard with
some hesitation, and, lifting her skirts to avoid draggling
them in the white dust, crossed towards the office.’ And
then consider the delicate incipience with which the narrator
describes even a pause in her motion as Jude sees it: ‘All of
a sudden … his cousin stood close to his elbow, pausing a
moment on the bend of her foot’, or again: ‘she halted on
the turn of her toe’; and we see the bent shoe or boot, but
also, though concealed, perhaps more clearly, the foot
within it [218]. Hardy is captivated by Sue’s motion to the
degree that instead of writing something straightforward
like ‘she wore a hat’, or something static as ‘a hat perched
on her head’, he writes the vividly expressive ‘a light hat
tossed on her head’ [89].1
Thus, when Jude visits Sue at the Melchester Normal
School, her appearance is as much of a shock to us as it is
to Jude, for the repressive environment has apparently
transformed almost every aspect of her personality:2
Though she had been here such a short while, she was
not as he had seen her last. All her bounding manner
was gone; her curves of motion had become subdued
lines.…
She wore a murrey-coloured gown with a little lace
collar. It was made quite plain, and hung about her
slight figure with clinging gracefulness. Her hair, which
formerly she had worn according to the custom of the
day, was now twisted up tightly, and she had
 altogether the air of a woman clipped and pruned by
severe discipline, an under-brightness shining through
from the depths which that discipline had not yet been
able to reach. [109]3
To observe of Sue that the ‘curves of her motion’ are
become ‘subdued lines’ is to see that the college has
squeezed her independence into a straight-jacket of
conformity. This mulberry-coloured uniform is the darkest
thing she wears until she is in mourning for her children, and
part of its effect in damping down her nature is achieved by
the very fact that it is dark and it is a uniform, that she is
constrained to wear exactly what everyone else wears.4 The
description of the cut of the dress implies that it is
moderately unusual for the 1890s in being worn without
much structure, in the aesthetic/pre-Raphaelite mode—it
clings gracefully like the muslin dresses of The Trumpet-
Major, though it is made of thick wool; it is without any of
the conventional subtleties or decorations of fashionable
dress. In its gracefulness, though not in its simplicity, it
contrasts with her tightly constrained hair, and in doing so
embodies such under-brightness as remains to her.
The narrator’s choice of metaphor to summarise her
appearance—‘a woman clipped and pruned by severe
discipline’—might either be seen as one from topiary, by
which the school takes wild and unformed shrubs and
reduces them to uniform shapes, that will ever after require
such clipping and pruning oversight by school inspectors; or
else, more generously, as one from husbandry, by which the
school cuts a plant severely back in the hope or expectation
that it will flourish more fully in the following growing
season. Either way, especially if we read with Jude’s
sensitivity, we might ask, do pruned trees suffer pain? Is the
next year’s growth sufficient compensation for the agony of
the knife? And it is further true that indiscriminate pruning is
unwise, for some plants die if you prune them too
vigorously. All things considered it is just as well that Sue
escapes and is dismissed from the college before even her
‘under-brightness’ can be extinguished.5
In the following chapter Jude takes Sue for a day out from
the College, and this time we get a suggestion of how Sue
feels about what she has to wear: she emerged ‘in a nunlike
simplicity of costume that was rather enforced than
desired’. It seems clear that Sue is not happy to appear so
plain and unfashionable; and in the sequel, as they walk
together towards the station, it seems that even the shape
of the dress isn’t, after all, particularly attractive: ‘Nobody
stared at Sue because she was so plainly dressed; which
comforted Jude in the thought that only himself knew the
charms those habiliments subdued. A matter of ten pounds
spent in a drapery-shop which had no connection with her
real life or her real self, would have set all Melchester
staring.’ I have discussed this passage earlier, in the chapter
on identity but here I want to consider it with a slightly
different emphasis. The dress, we have already seen, has
subdued Sue’s spirit, her liveliness of manner, her gaiety,
her unconventionality—things that charm Jude, and of which
he is able to feel the pride of private knowledge, knowledge
that makes in his mind a special connection with her. But in
the manuscript ‘subdued’ was originally ‘hid’, and in that
version it becomes more likely that Jude’s private thoughts
are weighted towards the physical—that he’s glad that the
plainness of the dress conceals the delightful shape of her
body, which a fashionable gown would make obvious. Hardy
perhaps hoped ‘subdued’ would allow both aspects of Sue’s
charm to be understood [109].6
This subduing plain dark woollen gown is also the one she
wears when, in order to escape solitary confinement, in
order to escape the darkness the school has thrown over her
personality, she wades up to her shoulders through the
deepest river in the county; it is the gown she has to dry,
along with her underlinen, in front of Jude’s fire, while
wearing his clothes. The situation * * * has significant
consequences for our understanding of her sexuality, her
gender-status and her identity.
When she marries the schoolteacher Phillotson we have
no idea what she wears, except for Jude’s last-minute
wedding gift to her of ‘two or three yards of white tulle,
which he threw over her, bonnet and all, as a veil’ [144].
This splash of lightness, both in colour and fabric,
anticipates the time when she leaves her husband and goes
to live with Jude, for during the whole of her life with him—at
least until the murder of her children—what we know of her
attire has a similar happy delicacy.
When she visits her deserted husband on his sick-bed and
causes him such exquisite misery, she is dressed in ‘light
spring clothing’ [204]. When she hears that her divorce from
him is finalized, she changes into a ‘joyful coloured gown in
observance of her liberty’ [210]—whatever the colour of joy
it must be light and bright surely. If there were doubts that
clothes do have an intimate connection with her ‘real self’,
the fact that she marks a time of high emotional intensity
with a fresh and appropriate dress should satisfy them. Even
Jude, normally unresponsive to such details, is stimulated to
emulation in a minor way: ‘seeing [her dress] Jude put on a
lighter tie’ [210]. The epitome of Sue’s appearance during
these years of happiness comes when, with Jude and Little
Father Time she attends the Great Wessex Agricultural
Show: ‘Sue, in her new summer clothes, flexible and light as
a bird, her little thumb stuck up by the stem of her white
cotton sunshade, went along as if she hardly touched
ground, and as if a moderately strong puff of wind would
float her over the hedge into the next field’ [237]. It is no
coincidence that Hardy has Arabella attend the show on the
same day: ‘a woman of rather fine figure and rather red
face, dressed in black material, and covered with beads
from bonnet to skirt, that made her glisten as if clad in
chain-mail …’ [236] Weighted down by her black clothes as
by her voluptuousness, she stalks Sue and Jude warily,
unseen, looking for nourishment, and finding it in revived
thoughts of why she had wanted Jude in the first place. In
fact she is here also distantly associated with birds—with
the heavy, sinister rooks that Jude attempts to scare from
farmer Troutham’s field, whose wings were ‘burnished like
tassets of mail’7 [14].

* * *

† From Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy Writing Dress (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011),
pp. 196–200. Reprinted by permission of Peter Lang AG. Page numbers in
square brackets refer to the print version of this Norton Critical Edition.
1. Contrast this with the verb that Hardy uses in similar circumstances to
describe Elizabeth-Jane’s assumption of headgear in The Mayor of
Casterbridge: “Elizabeth-Jane’s bonnet and shawl were pitch forked on in a
moment, and they went out” (Chapter 24).
2. Hardy’s sisters Mary and Katherine were both students at the Diocesan
training school in Salisbury Cathedral Close on which this school is based.
3. In the manuscript of the novel, ‘subdued lines’ were ‘right lines’ (MS f. 134).
Hardy made the change because, though he wanted something opposed to
‘curves’, ‘right lines’ wasn’t consonant with the dress that clung to her body
gracefully in the next paragraph; he chose ‘subdued’ in order to connect this
account with the idea a few pages later that the costume subdues her
‘charms’, where the word was also added in the manuscript.
4. Though there is a long history of the accessorization of school uniforms to
achieve an individual look, it is to be presumed that Sue’s school enforced
strict uniformity.
5. Discipline, however, in the form of religious fanaticism catches up with her in
the end; and possibly the most painful thing about the end of the novel is the
self-inflicted destruction of her ‘under-brightness’, first by remarrying, and
then more brutally by disciplining herself to have sex with Phillotson.
6. MS f. 139. The manuscript is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
7. ‘Tassets’ were ‘a series of articulated splints or plates depending from the
corset, placed so that each slightly overlapped the one below it, forming a
sort of kilt of armour to protect the thighs and the lower part of the trunk’
(OED). We should also be aware here of the contrast of the weight of the dark
woollen dress saturated with river-water and thus darkened still further that
Sue brings to Jude’s room in Melchester, with her lightness of being and dress
once she is partnered with Jude.
 Thomas Hardy: A Chronology

1840 (June 2) Born in the house built by his grandfather

(Thomas Hardy), in Higher Bockhampton, in the
parish of Stinsford, Dorset, first child of Thomas and
Jemima Hardy. (A brother and two sisters follow,
none of whom marries.)
1848 Attends school at Lower Bockhampton, but in the
next year is moved by his mother to a school in
Dorchester, three miles from his home.
1856 Leaves school and is apprenticed to a Dorchester
architect, John Hicks.
1862 Moves to London, where he works as an architect
for Arthur Blomfield. Attempts unsuccessfully to get
his poetry published.
1863 Is awarded an essay prize by the Royal Institute of
British Architects.
1865 Publishes a short, humorous sketch, “How I Built
Myself a House.”
1867 Returns to Dorset and resumes work for Hicks,
specialising in church restoration. Begins a novel,
The Poor Man and the Lady (never published and
later destroyed).
1869 Works as an architect in Weymouth, Dorset, for
Crickmay.
1870 While on architectural business in Cornwall, meets
and falls in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford.
1871 Desperate Remedies published anonymously.
1872 Under the Greenwood Tree.
1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes. (From this point on, all Hardy’s
novels appear initially as serials: dates given below
refer to first appearance in volume form.) Abandons
architecture to become a full-time writer. Suicide of
Hardy’s close friend and mentor, Horace Moule.
1874 Far from the Madding Crowd. Marries Emma Gifford;
honeymoon spent in France.
1876 The Hardys visit Holland and Germany. The Hand of
Ethelberta. After living in Swanage, Dorset, during
1875, the Hardys move to Sturminster Newton, also
in Dorset and more out-of-the-way.
1878 The Return of the Native. Moves to Tooting, in
London.
1880 The Trumpet-Major. Seriously ill.
1881 A Laodicean. Moves back to Dorset to live in
Wimborne.
1882 Two on a Tower.
1883 Moves to Dorchester.
1884 Made a Justice of the Peace.
1885 Moves into Max Gate, a large house built to his own
designs on the outskirts of Dorchester; it remains
his home for the rest of his life, though until 1911
he and his wife regularly spend part of each year in
London.
1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge.
1887 The Woodlanders. The Hardys visit France and Italy.
1888 Wessex Tales, Hardy’s first collection of short
stories.
1889 Several publishers reject the opening portion of
Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
1891 A Group of Noble Dames (short stories) and Tess of
the d’Urbervilles, which became both notorious and
a best-seller.
1892 Death of Hardy’s father.
1893 Visits Ireland and meets Mrs. Florence Henniker, to
whom he forms a close attachment. Collaborates
with her on The Spectre of the Real (1894).
1894 Life’s Little Ironies (short stories).
1895 Jude the Obscure. The first collected edition of
Hardy’s novels appears as “Wessex Novels” in
1896–96.
1897 The Well-Beloved is published (an early version had
appeared as a serial in 1892).
1898 Wessex Poems, with Hardy’s own illustrations: his
first collection of verse, it signals his abandonment
of the novel in favor of poetry.
1901 Poems of the Past and the Present. Increasing
estrangement from his wife in this period.
1904 Death of Hardy’s mother. Part 1 of The Dynasts, an
epic drama about the Napoleonic Wars (the second
part follows in 1906, the third and final part in
1908).
1909 Time’s Laughingstocks (poems).
1910 Awarded the Order of Merit by King George V after
refusing a knighthood.
1912 Death of Emma Hardy: the sequence “Poems of
1912–13” is written during the next few months.
The Wessex Edition of Hardy’s writings begins
publication.
1913 Revisits Cornwall, the scene of his courtship of
Emma, early in the year. A Changed Man (short
stories).
1914 Marries Florence Emily Dugdale (1879–1937).
Satires of Circumstance (poems).
1915 Death of Hardy’s sister Mary. Death at Gallipoli of
Frank George, Hardy’s cousin and chosen heir.
1916 Selected Poems, his own selection from his work to
date.
1917 Moments of Vision (poems).
1922 Late Lyrics and Earlier.
1923 Hardy’s play, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of
Cornwall. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII,
visits Hardy at Max Gate.
1925 Human Shows (poems). Theatre production of Tess
put on in London.
1928 (January 11) Hardy dies at Max Gate. Later in the
year Winter Words (poems) and The Early Life of
Thomas Hardy are published; the latter, though
issued under the name of Florence Hardy, is in
effect an autobiography, compiled during the last
two decades of Hardy’s life. (A second volume, The
Later Years of Thomas Hardy, follows in 1930.)
Death of Hardy’s brother, Henry.
1937 Death of Florence Hardy.
1940 Death of Kate Hardy, Hardy’s youngest sibling.
 Selected Bibliography

• indicates works included or excerpted in this Norton Critical Edition

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General Criticism
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On Jude the Obscure: General

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On Jude the Obscure: Textual

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Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928.
Jude the Obscure : an authoritative text, backgrounds and contexts, criticism /
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pages cm.—(A Norton critical edition)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928. Jude the obscure. 2. Stonemasons—Fiction.
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couples—Fiction. 6. Adultery—Fiction. 7. Wessex (England)—Fiction.
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