Chapter: Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten
o'clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had
accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same
intractable temper.

"That's the story about me in Marygreen, is it--that I entrapped 'ee?
Much of a catch you were, Lord send!"  As she warmed she saw some of
Jude's dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have
been laid.  "I won't have them books here in the way!" she cried
petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon
the floor.

"Leave my books alone!" he said.  "You might have thrown them
aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is
disgusting!"  In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had
become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently
left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers.  She continued
deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude,
incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave
off.  Somehow, in going so, he loosened the fastening of her hair,
and it rolled about her ears.

"Let me go!" she said.

"Promise to leave the books alone."

She hesitated.  "Let me go!" she repeated.

"Promise!"

After a pause: "I do."

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._"

All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the carcase of the
pig to Alfredston.  He then cleaned up the premises, locked the door,
put the key in a place she would know if she came back, and returned
to his masonry at Alfredston.

At night when he again plodded home he found she had not visited the
house.  The next day went in the same way, and the next.  Then there
came a letter from her.

That she had gone tired of him she frankly admitted.  He was such
a slow old coach, and she did not care for the sort of life he
led.  There was no prospect of his ever bettering himself or her.
She further went on to say that her parents had, as he knew, for
some time considered the question of emigrating to Australia, the
pig-jobbing business being a poor one nowadays.  They had at last
decided to go, and she proposed to go with them, if he had no
objection.  A woman of her sort would have more chance over there
than in this stupid country.

Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her going.  He
thought it a wise course, since she wished to go, and one that might
be to the advantage of both.  He enclosed in the packet containing
the letter the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig,
with all he had besides, which was not much.

From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly, though her
father and his household did not immediately leave, but waited till
his goods and other effects had been sold off.  When Jude learnt
that there was to be an auction at the house of the Donns he packed
his own household goods into a waggon, and sent them to her at the
aforesaid homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as
many of them as she should choose.

He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a shopwindow the
little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law's furniture.
He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude's going near
the place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by
the southern road was materially increased by the auction.  A few
days later he entered a dingy broker's shop in the main street
of the town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a
clothes-horse, rolling-pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-glass,
and other things at the back of the shop, evidently just brought in
from a sale, he perceived a framed photograph, which turned out to be
his own portrait.

It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man
in bird's-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given
her on their wedding-day.  On the back was still to be read, "_Jude
to Arabella_," with the date.  She must have thrown it in with the
rest of her property at the auction.

"Oh," said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles
in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself,
"It is a small lot of stuff that was knocked down to me at a cottage
sale out on the road to Marygreen.  The frame is a very useful one,
if you take out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling."

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought
home to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of
his portrait and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required
to demolish all sentiment in him.  He paid the shilling, took the
photograph away with him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he
reached his lodging.

Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had
departed.  He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal
leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise,
since she was bent on going, which perhaps was true.  On the evening
following their emigration, when his day's work was done, he came out
of doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too
familiar road towards the upland whereon had been experienced the
chief emotions of his life.  It seemed to be his own again.

He could not realize himself.  On the old track he seemed to be a
boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the
top of that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for
Christminster and scholarship.  "Yet I am a man," he said.  "I have
a wife.  More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having
disagreed with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted
from her."

He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at
which the parting between his father and his mother was said to have
occurred.

A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he
had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible.  A milestone, now
as always, stood at the roadside hard by.  Jude drew near it, and
felt rather than read the mileage to the city.  He remembered that
once on his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an
inscription on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations.
It had been done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before
he had been diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman.  He
wondered if the inscription were legible still, and going to the back
of the milestone brushed away the nettles.  By the light of a match
he could still discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long
ago:


            THITHER
             J. F.
   [with a pointing finger]


The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,
lit in his soul a spark of the old fire.  Surely his plan should
be to move onward through good and ill--to avoid morbid sorrow
even though he did see uglinesses in the world?  _Bene agere et
loetari_--to do good cheerfully--which he had heard to be the
philosophy of one Spinoza, might be his own even now.

He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original
intention.

By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a
north-easterly direction.  There actually rose the faint halo, a
small dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith.
It was enough for him.  He would go to Christminster as soon as the
term of his apprenticeship expired.

He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.

 The next day Jude and Arabella have an argument. She deliberately dirties and throws his books until Jude physically restrains her. She goes outside and exaggerates Jude's ill treatment of her. She accuses Jude of being just like his father and his aunt with regard to marriage. Later, Jude asks his Aunt Drusilla about his parents, and she confirms the story of his parents' unhappy marriage and separation and his mother's subsequent suicide. His father's sister, too, separated from her husband. Aunt Drusilla repeats that the Fawleys were not made for marriage. Jude returns home and on the way attempts to drown himself in a pond, but the ice is too thick. He then tries to forget his sorrows by drinking. Returning home, he finds that Arabella has left him. She writes a few days later to say that she is immigrating with her parents to Australia. Jude agrees to her plan. Jude goes to the hills again and stands on the old ridge track from where he had often gazed at Christminster. His childhood memories and his old ambitions are rekindled, and he decides to go to Christminster after completing his apprenticeship.

