by Thomas Hardy
He returned vehemently: “I do! Every atom and dreg of it! You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, 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 overburdened — 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. Oh 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 oh, 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!”
“Oh 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.”
“Oh 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, 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. “Oh, 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 n
ervous 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 overruled 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!”
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.
“Oh 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.
CHAPTER IV
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 alter 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 ‘sterical sort than mine. And she says, so I was told, that she’s your wife in the eye of Heaven and the Church — yours only; and can’t be anybody else’s by any act of man.”
“Ah — indeed? … Separated, have they!”
“You see, the eldest boy was mine — ”
“Oh — 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 hum-drum 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 remarrying 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 Rhadamanthine 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.