Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (641 page)

“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 steam-ploughs, and threshing-machines, and chaff-cutters, and cows, and pigs, and sheep.”

Jude was quite content with a baffle 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 luminaries 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!”

CHAPTER VI

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, 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 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 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 overtime 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. 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 thunder-storm a-raging, and they seemed to see in the gloom a dark figure with very thin legs and a curious voot, 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 reconsecrate 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!”

“Oh 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.”