Jude the Obsure - Page 43/318

"Most men think otherwise."

"I don't care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?"

"I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room."

"Ah--that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about

the adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday

evening. I thought when I married you that you had always lived in

your father's house."

"You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little

more finished than I could have been by staying where I was born.

There was not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I

went away for three months."

"You'll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won't you?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why, of course--little things to make."

"Oh."

"When will it be? Can't you tell me exactly, instead of in such

general terms as you have used?"

"Tell you?"

"Yes--the date."

"There's nothing to tell. I made a mistake."

"What?"

"It was a mistake."

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. "How can that be?"

"Women fancy wrong things sometimes."

"But--! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of

furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn't have hurried on our

affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready,

if it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary

to save you, ready or no... Good God!"

"Don't take on, dear. What's done can't be undone."

"I have no more to say!"

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence

between them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a

different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to

accept her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted

otherwise while ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to

prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social

ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes

involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one

opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of

contributing his units of work to the general progress of his

generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory

instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be

only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he

had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught

in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a

lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the

immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But

the marriage remained.