I Beg to Be Admitted — Jude the Obscure

Jude comes off the platform tottering, water running out of him. Arabella says he has done for himself. He meant to. A man with two wishes, to see a particular woman and then to die, could manage both by walking in the rain. He has seen Sue for the last time. Along the silent colleges he stops at archways where nobody is. Addison, Gibbon, Johnson. Rubric, Sarcophagus, Cardinal with its windows like lifted eyebrows. She wants a drink. He feels the fog from Cardinal meadows as death-claws. When I am dead, he says, you will see my spirit flitting up and down here.

That same rain at Marygreen. Mrs. Edlin finds Sue scrubbing stairs to discipline herself. Jude has been here. She still loves him, grossly. She will not see him again, but she will make her conscience right by the ultimate penance. Phillotson agrees to her living as she chooses. That, she says, is an indulgence she ought not to exact. Mrs. Edlin tells her not to force her nature. It is my duty. I will drink my cup to the dregs. She begs the widow to stay the night.

She kneels in her old room, then unlatches his door. I beg to be admitted. She has kissed Jude a good many times. She does not tell that she called him her darling Love. She swears on a brown Testament never to see him again. He warns her a third time. A half-marriage should be completed, with a lover hanging about. She starts back when he puts his arm round her. You shrink from me again? It is my duty. He lifts her through the doorway. A look of aversion passes; she clenches her teeth and utters no cry. On the landing Mrs. Edlin says weddings be funerals nowadays.