Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (639 page)

“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.” On the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marks 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 door-step, 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 tack 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,

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 bridal 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!”

“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 ha’n’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 tidden — 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!”

“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?”

CHAPTER V

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 beings 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, 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 dally.

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.