Jude The Obscure

'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 medi?valism 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 protegee 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.