"Of course I do.
I meant to do for myself."
"What—to commit suicide?"
"Certainly."
"Well, I'm blest!
Kill yourself for a woman."
"Listen to me, Arabella.
You think you are the stronger; and so you are, in a physical sense, now.
You could push me over like a nine-pin.
You did not send that letter the other day, and I could not resent your conduct.
But I am not so weak in another way as you think.
I made up my mind that a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one stroke by taking this journey in the rain.
That I've done.
I have seen her for the last time, and I've finished myself—put an end to a feverish life which ought never to have been begun!"
"Lord—you do talk lofty!
Won't you have something warm to drink?"
"No thank you.
Let's get home."
They went along by the silent colleges, and Jude kept stopping.
"What are you looking at?"
"Stupid fancies.
I see, in a way, those spirits of the dead again, on this my last walk, that I saw when I first walked here!"
"What a curious chap you are!"
"I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling.
But I don't revere all of them as I did then.
I don't believe in half of them.
The theologians, the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen, and others, no longer interest me.
All that has been spoilt for me by the grind of stern reality!"
The expression of Jude's corpselike face in the watery lamplight was indeed as if he saw people where there was nobody.
At moments he stood still by an archway, like one watching a figure walk out; then he would look at a window like one discerning a familiar face behind it.
He seemed to hear voices, whose words he repeated as if to gather their meaning.
"They seem laughing at me!"
"Who?"
"Oh—I was talking to myself!
The phantoms all about here, in the college archways, and windows. They used to look friendly in the old days, particularly Addison, and Gibbon, and Johnson, and Dr. Browne, and Bishop Ken—"
"Come along do!
Phantoms!
There's neither living nor dead hereabouts except a damn policeman!
I never saw the streets emptier."
"Fancy!
The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the great Dissector of Melancholy there!"
"I don't want to hear about 'em!
They bore me."
"Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that lane—Wycliffe—Harvey—Hooker—Arnold—and a whole crowd of Tractarian Shades—"
"I don't want to know their names, I tell you!
What do I care about folk dead and gone?
Upon my soul you are more sober when you've been drinking than when you have not!"
"I must rest a moment," he said; and as he paused, holding to the railings, he measured with his eye the height of a college front.
"This is old Rubric.
And that Sarcophagus; and Up that lane Crozier and Tudor: and all down there is Cardinal with its long front, and its windows with lifted eyebrows, representing the polite surprise of the university at the efforts of such as I."