Chapter: The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had
fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering
was timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so
that Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter
of a day.

The night had seemed strangely silent.  Jude looked out of the window
long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with
snow--snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still
falling.

"I'm afraid the pig-killer won't be able to come," he said to
Arabella.

"Oh, he'll come.  You must get up and make the water hot, if you want
Challow to scald him.  Though I like singeing best."

"I'll get up," said Jude.  "I like the way of my own county."

He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding
it with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze
flinging a cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of
cheerfulness was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze--to
heat water to scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as
yet lived, and whose voice could be continually heard from a corner
of the garden.  At half-past six, the time of appointment with the
butcher, the water boiled, and Jude's wife came downstairs.

"Is Challow come?" she asked.

"No."

They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a snowy
dawn.  She went out, gazed along the road, and returning said, "He's
not coming.  Drunk last night, I expect.  The snow is not enough to
hinder him, surely!"

"Then we must put it off.  It is only the water boiled for nothing.
The snow may be deep in the valley."

"Can't be put off.  There's no more victuals for the pig.  He ate the
last mixing o' barleymeal yesterday morning."

"Yesterday morning?  What has he lived on since?"

"Nothing."

"What--he has been starving?"

"Yes.  We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the
innerds.  What ignorance, not to know that!"

"That accounts for his crying so.  Poor creature!"

"Well--you must do the sticking--there's no help for it.  I'll show
you how.  Or I'll do it myself--I think I could.  Though as it is
such a big pig I had rather Challow had done it.  However, his basket
o' knives and things have been already sent on here, and we can use
'em."

"Of course you shan't do it," said Jude.  "I'll do it, since it must
be done."

He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the space of a
couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in front, with the
knives and ropes at hand.  A robin peered down at the preparations
from the nearest tree, and, not liking the sinister look of the
scene, flew away, though hungry.  By this time Arabella had joined
her husband, and Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the
affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to
repeated cries of rage.  Arabella opened the sty-door, and together
they hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude
held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to
keep him from struggling.

The animal's note changed its quality.  It was not now rage, but the
cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.

"Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had
this to do!" said Jude.  "A creature I have fed with my own hands."

"Don't be such a tender-hearted fool!  There's the sticking-knife--
the one with the point.  Now whatever you do, don't stick un too
deep."

"I'll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it.  That's
the chief thing."

"You must not!" she cried.  "The meat must be well bled, and to do
that he must die slow.  We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat
is red and bloody!  Just touch the vein, that's all.  I was brought
up to it, and I know.  Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long.
He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least."

"He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may
look," said Jude determinedly.  Scraping the bristles from the pig's
upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat;
then plunged in the knife with all his might.

"'Od damn it all!" she cried, "that ever I should say it!  You've
over-stuck un!  And I telling you all the time--"

"Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!"

"Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don't talk!"

However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done.  The
blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she
had desired.  The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final
tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on
Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing
at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

"Make un stop that!" said Arabella.  "Such a noise will bring
somebody or other up here, and I don't want people to know we are
doing it ourselves."  Picking up the knife from the ground whereon
Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the
windpipe.  The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming
through the hole.

"That's better," she said.

"It is a hateful business!" said he.

"Pigs must be killed."

The animal heaved in a final convulsion, and, despite the rope,
kicked out with all his last strength.  A tablespoonful of black
clot came forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some
seconds.

"That's it; now he'll go," said she.  "Artful creatures--they always
keep back a drop like that as long as they can!"

The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude stagger, and
in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which the blood
had been caught.

"There!" she cried, thoroughly in a passion.  "Now I can't make any
blackpot.  There's a waste, all through you!"

Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole
steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over
the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle--to those who
saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat.  The lips and
nostrils of the animal turned livid, then white, and the muscles of
his limbs relaxed.

"Thank God!" Jude said.  "He's dead."

"What's God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I
should like to know!" she said scornfully.  "Poor folks must live."

"I know, I know," said he.  "I don't scold you."

Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand.

"Well done, young married volk!  I couldn't have carried it out much
better myself, cuss me if I could!"  The voice, which was husky,
came from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaughter
they saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate,
critically surveying their performance.

"'Tis well for 'ee to stand there and glane!" said Arabella.  "Owing
to your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! 'Twon't
fetch so much by a shilling a score!"

Challow expressed his contrition.  "You should have waited a bit"
he said, shaking his head, "and not have done this--in the delicate
state, too, that you be in at present, ma'am.  'Tis risking yourself
too much."

"You needn't be concerned about that," said Arabella, laughing.
Jude too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in
his amusement.

Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the
scalding and scraping.  Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man
at what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and
that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by
deputy.  The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal,
wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a
Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended.  No
doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.

He did not like the road to Alfredston now.  It stared him cynically
in the face.  The wayside objects reminded him so much of his
courtship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he
read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.  Yet
he sometimes felt that by caring for books he was not escaping
common-place nor gaining rare ideas, every working-man being of that
taste now.  When passing near the spot by the stream on which he had
first made her acquaintance he one day heard voices just as he had
done at that earlier time.  One of the girls who had been Arabella's
companions was talking to a friend in a shed, himself being the
subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen him in the
distance.  They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were so thin
that he could hear their words as he passed.

"Howsomever, 'twas I put her up to it!  'Nothing venture nothing
have,' I said.  If I hadn't she'd no more have been his mis'ess than
I."

"'Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told
him she was..."

What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should
make her his "mis'ess," otherwise wife?  The suggestion was horridly
unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of
entering his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket
inside the garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his
old aunt and get some supper there.

This made his arrival home rather late.  Arabella however, was busy
melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out
on a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work.  Dreading lest what he
had heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he
spoke little.  But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other
things that she wanted some money.  Seeing the book sticking out of
his pocket she added that he ought to earn more.

"An apprentice's wages are not meant to be enough to keep a wife on,
as a rule, my dear."

"Then you shouldn't have had one."

"Come, Arabella!  That's too bad, when you know how it came about."

"I'll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you was true.
Doctor Vilbert thought so.  It was a good job for you that it wasn't
so!"

"I don't mean that," he said hastily.  "I mean before that time.
I know it was not your fault; but those women friends of yours gave
you bad advice.  If they hadn't, or you hadn't taken it, we should at
this moment have been free from a bond which, not to mince matters,
galls both of us devilishly.  It may be very sad, but it is true."

"Who's been telling you about my friends?  What advice?  I insist
upon you telling me."

"Pooh--I'd rather not."

"But you shall--you ought to.  It is mean of 'ee not to!"

"Very well."  And he hinted gently what had been revealed to him.
"But I don't wish to dwell upon it.  Let us say no more about it."

Her defensive manner collapsed.  "That was nothing," she said,
laughing coldly.  "Every woman has a right to do such as that.  The
risk is hers."

"I quite deny it, Bella.  She might if no lifelong penalty attached
to it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if the weakness
of the moment could end with the moment, or even with the year.
But when effects stretch so far she should not go and do that which
entraps a man if he is honest, or herself if he is otherwise."

"What ought I to have done?"

"Given me time...  Why do you fuss yourself about melting down that
pig's fat to-night?  Please put it away!"

"Then I must do it to-morrow morning.  It won't keep."

"Very well--do."




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.

 When the pig killer doesn't come to kill the pig Jude and Arabella have been fattening, Jude is forced to do the job. He wants to kill it quickly so as to be merciful, but Arabella insists it should slowly bleed to death so that the meat will be better. Jude sticks the pig deeply and it bleeds quickly, much to Arabella's disgust and anger. Coming home from work that day, he overhears Arabella's girl friend tell another girl she put Arabella up to tricking Jude. When he confronts Arabella with this, she makes light of it, saying many girls work the same deception. But Jude insists she was wrong to so trap him into a marriage satisfactory to neither of them. When the next morning, a Sunday, in the course of her work with the pig's fat Arabella tosses some of Jude's books aside, he gets angry at her. She leaves the house and, disheveled, walks up and down the road in front, lamenting her ill-treatment and accusing Jude of being like his father and his father's sister in their relationship to their spouses. When Jude goes to his aunt to ask her about this, she tells him his parents couldn't get along and separated, his mother later drowning herself. His father's sister couldn't get along with her husband and eventually left him, taking her daughter Sue with her. In despair Jude walks out onto the ice of a pond as if to drown himself, but the ice doesn't break. He decides to do something more suitable to his degraded state and goes to get drunk. Coming home later, he discovers Arabella has gone, leaving him a note that she will not return. In a few days she writes to say she wants no more of him and she is going with her family to Australia. Jude replies that he has no objection and sends her money as well as his household goods for her to include in the auction the family is going to have. Later, in a secondhand store he discovers among the goods from the sale that the dealer has bought a photograph he gave Arabella. This puts an end to whatever feeling he may yet have for her. On a stroll one evening he comes to the place on the ridge-track from which he has so often looked for Christminster and realizes that though much has happened he has still not achieved his ambitions. These ambitions are reawakened by his seeing on the back of a milestone nearby an inscription he carved to symbolize his goal in life. He decides to go to Christminster as soon as his apprenticeship has ended.

