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."