by Thomas Hardy
“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 — ”
“Oh 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. 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!’“…
“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 fetishists 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 Tractarian 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?”
“Oh yes. How was that made?”
“I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures, and rearranging 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!” he murmured.
“Indeed? Then I won’t say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I hate such hum-bug 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?’ 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 Euclid 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 Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard.
CHAPTER V
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.”
“Oh, 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.
“Oh 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-bit 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 to 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 up-stairs,” 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.
“Oh, 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!”
“Oh, 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. Oh, 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.
