Grease on the Classics — Jude the Obscure

Sunday morning Arabella goes back to melting pig fat, and last night's talk puts her in a fighting mood. She sees Jude's classics on the table and throws them on the floor with grease still on her hands. He catches her arms to make her stop and loosens her hair. She walks into the highway, pulls the hair worse, unfastens her gown, and tells passing couples that he makes her work on Sunday and tears her clothes. He starts after her, then stops. The marriage, he sees, was a permanent contract built on a temporary feeling.

At his aunt's he asks whether his father ill-used his mother. Drusilla tells him they parted on the hill by the Brown House, his mother drowned herself, and the Fawleys were not made for wedlock. He walks onto a frozen pond and jumps, hoping the ice will take him. It will not. He drinks at the inn where he once courted Arabella, under the painting of Samson and Delilah, and comes home to a note pinned to the fireplace: she has gone to her friends and shall not return. A letter follows. She is tired of him, calls him a slow old coach, and will emigrate to Australia with her parents. He sends the pig money and makes no objection.

Days later he finds his wedding portrait in a broker's shop, sold with the Donn auction goods, and pays a shilling so he can burn it. Walking the old hill he scrapes nettles from the milestone where he once cut a pointing finger and the word Thither. The faint halo of Christminster is still on the horizon. He will go when the apprenticeship ends.