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.).
_“There are two who decline, a woman and I,_ _And enjoy our death in the darkness here.”_ —R. BROWNING.
I
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!—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.
“Oh, 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 the Italian porch, whose helical columns were heavily draped with creepers, and pursued the lane till there arose on Jude’s sight the circular theatre 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 robes 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, 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?”
Jude assented to this also.
“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 finds 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?’”
“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.
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 festival 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 with our 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. Oh—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! … 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?”
Sue 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 someone 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 householder 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.
II
Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little more than an old intramural 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 College also were discernible beyond the other, and the tower of a third farther 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, 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 to-morrow!”
“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?”
“Oh—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 like 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. “Oh 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. “Oh 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 to-morrow; 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. “Oh, oh 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!’”
Jude listened—“No—they are not talking of us,” he said. “They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!”
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… Oh, 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. Oh 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’être_ 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! … Oh 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_. 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. Oh 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! Oh 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 swage 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.