Chapter: Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the scene
outside the uncurtained window.  At some distance opposite, the outer
walls of Sarcophagus College--silent, black, and windowless--threw
their four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little
room she occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by
day.  The outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond the
other, and the tower of a third farther off still.  She thought of
the strange operation of a simple-minded man's ruling passion, that
it should have led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly,
to place them here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still
haunted by his dream.  Even now he did not distinctly hear the
freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed to his
desire.

The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this
house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy--a
brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him.  The
silence was broken by his saying: "Mother, WHAT shall we do
to-morrow!"

"I don't know!" said Sue despondently.  "I am afraid this will
trouble your father."

"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him!
Then it wouldn't matter so much!  Poor Father!"

"It wouldn't!"

"Can I do anything?"

"No!  All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"

"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"

"Partly."

"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

"It would almost, dear."

"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a
good lodging?"

"Well--people do object to children sometimes."

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"

"Oh--because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed."

"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,
and you needn't have had me unless you liked.  I oughtn't to have
come to 'ee--that's the real truth!  I troubled 'em in Australia,
and I trouble folk here.  I wish I hadn't been born!"

"You couldn't help it, my dear."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they
should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not
allowed to grow big and walk about!"

Sue did not reply.  She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this
too reflective child.

She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she
would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties
like an aged friend.

"There is going to be another in our family soon," she hesitatingly
remarked.

"How?"

"There is going to be another baby."

"What!"  The boy jumped up wildly.  "Oh God, Mother, you've never
a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you've got!"

"Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!" murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.

The boy burst out weeping.  "Oh you don't care, you don't care!" he
cried in bitter reproach.  "How EVER could you, Mother, be so wicked
and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better
off, and Father well!  To bring us all into MORE trouble!  No room
for us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow;
and yet you be going to have another of us soon! ...  'Tis done o'
purpose!--'tis--'tis!"  He walked up and down sobbing.

"Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!" she pleaded, her bosom heaving
now as much as the boy's. "I can't explain--I will when you are
older.  It does seem--as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in
these difficulties!  I can't explain, dear!  But it--is not quite on
purpose--I can't help it!"

"Yes it is--it must be!  For nobody would interfere with us, like
that, unless you agreed!  I won't forgive you, ever, ever!  I'll
never believe you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!"

He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which
a bed had been spread on the floor.  There she heard him say: "If we
children was gone there'd be no trouble at all!"

"Don't think that, dear," she cried, rather peremptorily.  "But go to
sleep!"

The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided
to get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had
informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before
he went out.  She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children,
who, as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.

She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a
counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him
her homelessness.  He had been so anxious about her all night, he
said.  Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings
did not seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night
before, nor did even her failure to find another place affect her so
deeply as at first.  Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth
while to insist upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate
steps for removal.

"You must all come to this inn for a day or two," he said.  "It is
a rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we
shall have more time to look round.  There are plenty of lodgings in
the suburbs--in my old quarter of Beersheba.  Have breakfast with me
now you are here, my bird.  You are sure you are well?  There will
be plenty of time to get back and prepare the children's meal before
they wake.  In fact, I'll go with you."

She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they
started together, resolving to clear out from Sue's too respectable
lodging immediately.  On reaching the place and going upstairs she
found that all was quiet in the children's room, and called to the
landlady in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and
something for their breakfast.  This was perfunctorily done, and
producing a couple of eggs which she had brought with her she put
them into the boiling kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the
youngsters, while she went to call them, it being now about half-past
eight o'clock.

Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand,
timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner
chamber where the children lay.  A shriek from Sue suddenly caused
him to start round.  He saw that the door of the room, or rather
closet--which had seemed to go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed
it back--was open, and that Sue had sunk to the floor just within it.
Hastening forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the little
bed spread on the boards; no children were there.  He looked in
bewilderment round the room.  At the back of the door were fixed
two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two
youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each
of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little
Jude was hanging in a similar manner.  An overturned chair was near
the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but
those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.

Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene, he
let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three
children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary
handling seemed to say that they were dead.  He caught up Sue, who
was in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after
which he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.

When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless
women, bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them,
and the triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew
his self-command.  The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had
inferred, his presence was superfluous.  The children were past
saving, for though their bodies were still barely cold it was
conjectured that they had been hanging more than an hour.  The
probability held by the parents later on, when they were able to
reason on the case, was that the elder boy, on waking, looked into
the outer room for Sue, and, finding her absent, was thrown into a
fit of aggravated despondency that the events and information of the
evening before had induced in his morbid temperament.  Moreover a
piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written, in
the boy's hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried:


   _Done because we are too menny._


At sight of this Sue's nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the
tragedy, throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no
abatement.  They carried her away against her wish to a room on the
lower floor; and there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her
gasps, and her eyes staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house
vainly trying to soothe her.

They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and
she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing
so by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might
do harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of
herself lest she should endanger a coming life.  Her inquiries were
incessant, and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope.
As soon as she could speak she informed him what she had said to the
boy, and how she thought herself the cause of this.

"No," said Jude.  "It was in his nature to do it.  The Doctor says
there are such boys springing up amongst us--boys of a sort unknown
in the last generation--the outcome of new views of life.  They seem
to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying
power to resist them.  He says it is the beginning of the coming
universal wish not to live.  He's an advanced man, the Doctor: but
he can give no consolation to--"

Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now
broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in
some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach.  When
everybody was gone, she was allowed to see the children.

The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation.  On
that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow
which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents,
mistakes, fears, errors of the last.  He was their nodal point, their
focus, their expression in a single term.  For the rashness of those
parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and
for the misfortunes of these he had died.

When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the
coroner's inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of
the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

"What is it?" said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

"The organ of the college chapel.  The organist practising I suppose.
It's the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; 'Truly God is loving
unto Israel.'"

She sobbed again.  "Oh, oh my babies!  They had done no harm!  Why
should they have been taken away, and not I!"

There was another stillness--broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.

"They are talking about us, no doubt!" moaned Sue.  "'We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!'"

Jude listened--"No--they are not talking of us," he said.  "They
are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward
position.  Good God--the eastward position, and all creation
groaning!"

Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable
fit of grief.  "There is something external to us which says, 'You
shan't!'  First it said, 'You shan't learn!'  Then it said, 'You
shan't labour!'  Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"

He tried to soothe her by saying, "That's bitter of you, darling."

"But it's true!"

Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room.  The baby's
frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time
of his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain
have got them out of her sight.  But whenever he touched them she
implored him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the
woman of the house when she also attempted to put them away.

Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms.  "Why don't you speak to me, Jude?" she cried out, after
one of these.  "Don't turn away from me!  I can't BEAR the loneliness
of being out of your looks!"

"There, dear; here I am," he said, putting his face close to hers.

"Yes...  Oh, my comrade, our perfect union--our two-in-oneness--is
now stained with blood!"

"Shadowed by death--that's all."

"Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn't know I was
doing it!  I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age.  I said the world was against us, that it was better to
be out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally.
And I told him I was going to have another child.  It upset him.  Oh
how bitterly he upbraided me!"

"Why did you do it, Sue?"

"I can't tell.  It was that I wanted to be truthful.  I couldn't
bear deceiving him as to the facts of life.  And yet I wasn't
truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.--Why
was I half-wiser than my fellow-women?  And not entirely wiser!  Why
didn't I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities?  It
was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things
nor reveal them!"

"Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only
in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps.  He must have
known sooner or later."

"And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall
never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! ...  My eyes are
so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year
ago I called myself happy!  We went about loving each other too
much--indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other!  We
said--do you remember?--that we would make a virtue of joy.  I said
it was Nature's intention, Nature's law and _raison d'etre_ that we
should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us--instincts which
civilization had taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I
said!  And now Fate has given us this stab in the back for being such
fools as to take Nature at her word!"

She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, "It is best,
perhaps, that they should be gone.--Yes--I see it is!  Better that
they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!"

"Yes," replied Jude.  "Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy."

"But they don't know! ...  Oh my babies, my babies, could you be
alive now!  You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he
wouldn't have done it.  It was not unreasonable for him to die: it
was part of his incurably sad nature, poor little fellow!  But then
the others--my OWN children and yours!"

Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and
shoes; and her figure quivered like a string.  "I am a pitiable
creature," she said, "good neither for earth nor heaven any more!
I am driven out of my mind by things!  What ought to be done?"
She stared at Jude, and tightly held his hand.

"Nothing can be done," he replied.  "Things are as they are, and will
be brought to their destined issue."

She paused.  "Yes!  Who said that?" she asked heavily.

"It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_.  It has been in my mind
continually since this happened."

"My poor Jude--how you've missed everything!--you more than I, for
I did get you!  To think you should know that by your unassisted
reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!"

After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and
next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral.  Accounts in
the newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood
apparently counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls.
Doubt of the real relations of the couple added zest to their
curiosity.  Sue had declared that she would follow the two little
ones to the grave, but at the last moment she gave way, and the
coffins were quietly carried out of the house while she was lying
down.  Jude got into the vehicle, and it drove away, much to the
relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue and her luggage
remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear of later on
in the day, and so to have freed his house from the exasperating
notoriety it had acquired during the week through his wife's unlucky
admission of these strangers.  In the afternoon he privately
consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that if any
objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there they
would try to get its number changed.

When Jude had seen the two little boxes--one containing little Jude,
and the other the two smallest--deposited in the earth he hastened
back to Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not
disturb her just then.  Feeling anxious, however, he went again
about four o'clock.  The woman thought she was still lying down, but
returned to him to say that she was not in her bedroom after all.
Her hat and jacket, too, were missing: she had gone out.  Jude
hurried off to the public house where he was sleeping.  She had not
been there.  Then bethinking himself of possibilities he went along
the road to the cemetery, which he entered, and crossed to where the
interments had recently taken place.  The idlers who had followed to
the spot by reason of the tragedy were all gone now.  A man with a
shovel in his hands was attempting to earth in the common grave of
the three children, but his arm was held back by an expostulating
woman who stood in the half-filled hole.  It was Sue, whose coloured
clothing, which she had never thought of changing for the mourning he
had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than the conventional
garb of bereavement could express.

"He's filling them in, and he shan't till I've seen my little ones
again!" she cried wildly when she saw Jude.  "I want to see them once
more.  Oh Jude--please Jude--I want to see them!  I didn't know you
would let them be taken away while I was asleep!  You said perhaps I
should see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you
didn't, but took them away!  Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!"

"She's been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get
to the coffins," said the man with the spade.  "She ought to be took
home, by the look o' her.  She is hardly responsible, poor thing,
seemingly.  Can't dig 'em up again now, ma'am.  Do ye go home with
your husband, and take it quiet, and thank God that there'll be
another soon to swage yer grief."

But Sue kept asking piteously: "Can't I see them once more--just
once!  Can't I?  Only just one little minute, Jude?  It would not
take long!  And I should be so glad, Jude!  I will be so good, and
not disobey you ever any more, Jude, if you will let me?  I would go
home quietly afterwards, and not want to see them any more!  Can't I?
Why can't I?"

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.

 Little Father Time is depressed and gloomy at their inability to find lodgings. Before they go to bed, Sue talks to him and tells him that another baby is on the way. Little Father Time is horrified at the thought of another mouth to feed and bitterly blames Sue for having ruined them. He declares it would be better if he and the other children were gone. The next morning Sue goes out early to meet Jude and to tell him that she has failed to find any lodgings. When they return, Sue goes to wake the children but finds that Little Father Time has hanged the younger children and then himself. Sue is overcome with horror and falls unconscious. Jude too is overcome with grief. Later there is a coroner's inquest and then a funeral, which Jude does not allow Sue to attend. Jude, however, learns that Sue has gone on her own to the graveyard and is telling the gravedigger to stop filling the grave and to show her the dead children. Jude takes her back home, but her agitation and wild grief have already affected her health. She gives birth to a stillborn child.

