Part 63 (1/2)
”You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't see how things are.”
”Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall. I am overburdened-and you, too, are unhinged just now.” He put his arm round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk without his support.
”I don't dislike you, Jude,” she said in a sweet and imploring voice. ”I love you as much as ever! Only-I ought not to love you-any more. Oh I must not any more!”
”I can't own it.”
”But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to him-I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter it!”
”But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this world? Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!”
”But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified eternally in the church at Melchester.”
”Sue, Sue-affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state! After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you suddenly turn to the right-about like this-for no reason whatever, confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely! You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in me for the Church as an old acquaintance... What I can't understand in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? How you argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract-which it is-how you showed all the objections to it-all the absurdities! If two and two made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now? I can't understand it, I repeat!”
”Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man observing people listening to music. You say 'What are they regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is.”
”That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel! You threw off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go back upon yourself. I confess I am utterly stultified in my estimate of you.”
”Dear friend, my only friend, don't be hard with me! I can't help being as I am, I am convinced I am right-that I see the light at last. But oh, how to profit by it!”
They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the building and she had returned the key. ”Can this be the girl,” said Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now that he was in the open street; ”can this be the girl who brought the pagan deities into this most Christian city?-who mimicked Miss Fontover when she crushed them with her heel?-quoted Gibbon, and Sh.e.l.ley, and Mill? Where are dear Apollo, and dear Venus now!”
”Oh don't, don't be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!” she sobbed. ”I can't bear it! I was in error-I cannot reason with you. I was wrong-proud in my own conceit! Arabella's coming was the finish. Don't satirize me: it cuts like a knife!”
He flung his arms round her and kissed her pa.s.sionately there in the silent street, before she could hinder him. They went on till they came to a little coffee-house. ”Jude,” she said with suppressed tears, ”would you mind getting a lodging here?”
”I will-if, if you really wish? But do you? Let me go to our door and understand you.”
He went and conducted her in. She said she wanted no supper, and went in the dark upstairs and struck a light. Turning she found that Jude had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door. She went to him, put her hand in his, and said ”Good-night.”
”But Sue! Don't we live here?”
”You said you would do as I wished!”
”Yes. Very well! ... Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue distastefully as I have done! Perhaps as we couldn't conscientiously marry at first in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, we ought to have parted. Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!”
”I am so glad you see that much, at any rate. I never deliberately meant to do as I did. I slipped into my false position through jealousy and agitation!”
”But surely through love-you loved me?”
”Yes. But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere lovers; until-”
”But people in love couldn't live for ever like that!”
”Women could: men can't, because they-won't. An average woman is in this superior to an average man-that she never instigates, only responds. We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”
”I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said before! ... Well, as you will! ... But human nature can't help being itself.”