“Have you any female relations yourself?” asked he.
“Lots,” replied Ratcliffe, calling up in memory his cousins and aunts, females of the highest upper-middle-class respectability, and vaguely wondering what they would think of Jude could they see her.
“The bother is,” said Satan, “she don’t take to women folk; always was against them, and that Thelusson woman put the cap on the business, kissin’ her and handin’ out slop talk. Well, I don’t know. I reckon she’ll have to go on bein’ what she is till somethin’ happens; but it would have been a lot handier if she’d been born a boy.”
He turned and went below.
The sun had sunk beyond Palm Island, and a violet dusk, forerunner of the dark, was spreading through the sky. Over beyond the Natchez the sea for a moment became hard looking as a floor of beryl, then vague.
Ratcliffe, lingering for a moment watching this transformation scene, found himself thinking of Jude and her problem. The Tylers had taken an extraordinarily firm hold upon him. He knew them more intimately than he knew his own relations, or fancied so. It seemed to him that he had known them for years.
When this cruise was over and he packed up his traps and left them, he would probably never see them again. Jude and Satan would go their way and he would go his way—and what would happen to Jude? Suppose Satan were to die, get knocked on the head or “fall to the smallpox”? The thought hurt him almost as much as it hurt Satan; for Jude had, somehow or another, captured his mind and touched his heart, and her youth and absolute irresponsibility before the major facts of life had infected him in the most extraordinary manner.
Over there on the island, engaged in the serious matter of provisioning the Sarah, they had been carrying on like children. He had not thought of it then; now, reflecting sanely, it rose before him together with the rest of this strange cruise, and for a moment the whole business seemed mad, absolutely mad. The supersane figure of Skelton rose up before him, and beyond Skelton, Oxford, the calm, sane English country, where the Tylers would have been impossible, the hard bourgeois conventions of the upper-upper-middle classes, those uncles, cousins, and aunts to whom Class was as holy as Sunday and to whom Jude would be absolutely invisible as she was.
He was engaged in these reflections when a voice broke the stillness of the evening, a half-tired, half-cantankerous voice, the voice of an overworked housekeeper who had been frying fish while others have been idling.
“Ain’t you comin’ to help me?” inquired the voice.