Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he
almost felt he would try to get the man to accede. But it could
do no good, and might make her still worse; and he saw that it
was imperative to get her home at once. So he coaxed her, and
whispered tenderly, and put his arm round her to support her; till
she helplessly gave in, and was induced to leave the cemetery.
He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so
imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly,
Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing. They were to
have gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was
not practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated
house. Sue was at once got to bed, and the doctor sent for.
Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the
intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely
born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.
III
Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had
again obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings
now, in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of
Ceremonies--Saint Silas.
They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of
things than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness. Vague
and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect
scintillated like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody
composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused
intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the
first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not
reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial
conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such
a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures
subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and
educated humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces loom
anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of
Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.
"We must conform!" she said mournfully. "All the ancient wrath of
the Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and
we must submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use fighting
against God!"
"It is only against man and senseless circumstance," said Jude.
"True!" she murmured. "What have I been thinking of! I am getting
as superstitious as a savage! ... But whoever or whatever our foe
may be, I am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength
left; no more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten! ... 'We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!' I am always
saying that now."