第22章 At Marygreen(22)

Jude relinquished his hold,and she crossed the room to the door,out of which she went with a set face,and into the highway.Here she began to saunter up and down,perversely pulling her hair into a worse disorder than he had caused,and unfastening several buttons of her gown.It was a fine Sunday morning,dry,clear and frosty,and the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north.People were going along the road,dressed in their holiday clothes;they were mainly lovers -such pairs as Jude and Arabella had been when they sported along the same track some months earlier.These pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now presented,bonnetless,her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind,her bodice apart her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work,and her hands reeking with melted fat.One of the passers said in mock terror:'Good Lord deliver us!'

'See how he's served me!'she cried.'Making me work Sunday mornings when I ought to be going to my church,and tearing my hair off my head,and my gown off my back!'

Jude was exasperated,and went out to drag her in by main force.

Then he suddenly lost his heat.Illuminated with the sense that all was over between them,and that it mattered not what she did,or he,her husband stood still,regarding her.Their lives were ruined,he thought;ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union:that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

'Going to ill-use me on principle,as your father ill-used your mother,and your father's sister ill-used her husband?'she asked.'All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!'

Jude fixed an arrested,surprised look on her.But she said no more,and continued her saunter till she was tired.He left the spot,and,after wandering vaguely a little while,walked in the direction of Marygreen.

Here he called upon his great-aunt,whose infirmities daily increased.

'Aunt -did my father ill-use my mother,and my aunt her husband?'

said Jude abruptly,sitting down by the fire.

She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that she always wore.'Who's been telling you that?'she said.

'I have heard it spoken of,and want to know all.'

'You med so well,I s'pose;though your wife -I reckon 'twas she -must have been a fool to open up that!There isn't much to know after all.Your father and mother couldn't get on together,and they parted.

It was coming home from Alfredston market,when you were a baby -on the hill by the Brown House barn -that they had their last difference,and took leave of one another for the last time.Your mother soon afterwards died -she drowned herself,in short,and your father went away with you to South Wessex,and never came here any more.'

Jude recalled his father's silence about North Wessex and Jude's mother,never speaking of either till his dying day.

'It was the same with your father's sister.Her husband offended her,and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to London with her little maid.The Fawleys were not made for wedlock:

it never seemed to sit well upon us.There's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound.That's why you ought to have hearkened to me,and not ha'married.'

'Where did Father and Mother part -by the Brown House,did you say?'

'A little further on -where the road to Fenworth branches off,and the handpost stands.A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our history.But let that be.'

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt's as if to go home.But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon it till he came to a large round pond.The frost continued,though it was not particularly sharp,and the larger stars overhead came out slow and flickering.Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice,and then the other:it cracked under his weight;but this did not deter him.He ploughed his way inward to the centre,the ice making sharp noises as he went.When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a jump.The cracking repeated itself;but he did not go down.He jumped again,but the cracking had ceased.Jude went back to the edge,and stepped upon the ground.

It was curious,he thought.What was he reserved for?He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide.Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject,and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination;what was there less noble,more in keeping with his present degraded position?

He could get drunk.Of course that was it;he had forgotten.Drinking was the regular,stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless.He began to see now why some men boozed at inns.He struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house.On entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson and Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as that he had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday evening of their courtship.He called for liquor and drank briskly for an hour or more.

Staggering homeward late that night,with all his sense of depression gone,and his head fairly clear still,he began to laugh boisterously,and to wonder how Arabella would receive him in his new aspect.The house was in darkness when he entered,and in his stumbling state it was some time before he could get a light.Then he found that,though the marks of pig-dressing,of fats and scallops,were visible,the materials themselves had been taken away.A line written by his wife on the inside of an old envelope was pinned to the cotton blower of the fireplace:

'Have gone to my friends .Shall not return .'