PART SECOND—At Christminster
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
PART THIRD—At Melchester
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
PART FOURTH—At Shaston
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
PART FIFTH—At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
PART SIXTH—At Christminster Again
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
PREFACE
The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been
much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly
as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887
and onward, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a
woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October, 1892;
the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893,
and at full length, as it now appears, from August, 1893, onward into
the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being
in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a
serial story in HARPER’S MAGAZINE at the end of November, 1894, and was
continued in monthly parts.
But, as in the case of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, the magazine
version was, for various reasons, abridged and modified in some degree,
the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as
originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early
decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a
provisional name—two such titles having, in fact, been successively
adopted. The present and final title, deemed on the whole the best, was
one of the earliest thought of.
For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age, which
attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and
disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to
humanity, and to point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of
unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling
to which exception can be taken.
Like former productions of this pen, _Jude the Obscure_ is simply an
endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or
personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their
discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being
regarded as not of the first moment.
T.H.
_August_, 1895.
Part First AT MARYGREEN
_“Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and
become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred,
and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be
strong, seeing they do thus?”_—ESDRAS.
I
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse
to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles
off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing
teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the
managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in
addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had
bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning
instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never
acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a
perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.
The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the
new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything
would be smooth again.
The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should
not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city
he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just
at first.
A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: “Aunt have got a
great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve found
a place to settle in, sir.”
“A proper good notion,” said the blacksmith.
It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an old
maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr.
Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started to see
about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy and the
schoolmaster were left standing alone.
“Sorry I am going, Jude?” asked the latter kindly.
Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day
scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, but
one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher’s
term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood
at the present moment afar off, like certain historic disciples,
indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he
was sorry.
“So am I,” said Mr. Phillotson.
“Why do you go, sir?” asked the boy.
“Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons,
Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.”
“I think I should now, sir.”
“Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is,
and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man who
wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be a
university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at
Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and
if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot
will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have
elsewhere.”
The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house was
dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give the
instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in the school
till the evening, when more hands would be available for removing it;
and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
_impedimenta_, and bade his friends good-bye.
“I shan’t forget you, Jude,” he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt me
out for old acquaintance’ sake.”
The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner by
the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge of the
greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help his
patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip now
and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused
and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, his face
wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of
life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was looking was
as ancient as the village itself, and from his present position
appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of
quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There was a
lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the hart’s-tongue
fern.
He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, that
the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning
like this, and would never draw there any more. “I’ve seen him look
down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I do now, and
when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! But he was too
clever to bide here any longer—a small sleepy place like this!”
A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning was
a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as a thicker
fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were interrupted by a
sudden outcry:
“Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!”
It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his own
pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started with
them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
stood—nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet of
Marygreen.
It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an
undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it was,
however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and
dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many
trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump-backed,
wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either
cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty
walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the
flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of
modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a
new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who
had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long
had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even
recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been
the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by
eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.
II
Slender as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming
house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door
was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted in
yellow letters, “Drusilla Fawley, Baker.” Within the little lead panes
of the window—this being one of the few old houses left—were five
bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an
animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,
the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers. Having seen
the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of the
event, and indulging in predictions of his future.
“And who’s he?” asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy
entered.
“Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew—come since you
was last this way.” The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, gaunt
woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and gave a
phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. “He come from
Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago—worse luck for ’n,
Belinda” (turning to the right) “where his father was living, and was
took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you know,
Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing if
Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless
boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be
done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can.
Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. It keeps him out
of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she continued, as the boy,
feeling the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved
aside.
The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of
Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him
with her—“to kip ’ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the
winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.”
Miss Fawley doubted it. … “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to take
’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,” she continued,
in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one.
The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather.
His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not seen the
child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four
walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were
married, didn’ get a house of their own for some year or more; and then
they only had one till—Well, I won’t go into that. Jude, my child,
don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any
more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till
the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!”
Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went
out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast.
The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging from the garden
by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a path northward, till
he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of the
upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This vast concave was the scene
of his labours for Mr. Troutham the farmer, and he descended into the
midst of it.
The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round,
where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge
and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the
scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the
arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the
fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though
once by many of his own dead family.
“How ugly it is here!” he murmured.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a
piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse,
taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that
of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really
attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient
harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of
ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play,
bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on
every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet
had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge
which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given
themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by
the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made
love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next
seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this
neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a
lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a
work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good to feed in.
The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds
used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off
pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished
like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him
warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew
sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like
himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he
frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of gentle
friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in the
least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that
she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.
“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You _shall_ have some
dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can
afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make
a good meal!”
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed
their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life
with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled
his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean
and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself as
their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his
buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised
senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence used. The
birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the
latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red
face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the clacker swinging in
his hand.
“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear birdies,’
indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, ‘Eat, dear
birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the
schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s how
you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!”
Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham
had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame
round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts with the
flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with the blows,
which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.
“Don’t ’ee, sir—please don’t ’ee!” cried the whirling child, as
helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked fish
swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the
path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circular
race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good crop in the ground—I
saw ’em sow it—and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner—and you
wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to
’em—oh, oh, oh!”
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more
than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still
smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing to
resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant
workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of
clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new church
tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the
farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man.
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the
quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it
him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and never let
him see him in one of those fields again.
Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway
weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the
perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was
good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful
sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in
the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.
With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the
village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge
and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms lying
half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as they always did
in such weather at that time of the year. It was impossible to advance
in regular steps without crushing some of them at each tread.
Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not
himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of
young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and
often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next
morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a
fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the
tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy.
This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was
the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the
curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with
him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the earthworms,
without killing a single one.
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a
little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do you
come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?”
“I’m turned away.”
“What?”
“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few
peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!”
He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.
“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him a
lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands
doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! don’t
ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than myself,
come to that. But ’tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are younger than I
have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set
with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my father’s journeyman,
anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ’ee go to work for ’n, which
I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ’ee out of mischty.”
More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for
dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,
and only secondarily from a moral one.
“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham
planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t go
off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? But,
oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy side of the
family, and never will be!”
“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson is
gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence.
“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a
score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever to
have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.”
“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?”
“How can I tell?”
“Could I go to see him?”
“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as
that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor
folk in Christminster with we.”
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an
undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the
pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and the
position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat
over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at
the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought
responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had
thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy
towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his
sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the
centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you
had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of
shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something
glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the
little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a
man.
Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.
During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the
afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the
village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.
“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin
there—not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.”
The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that
field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something
unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness
of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The farmer
had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet Christminster
lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, stealing out of the
hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which had witnessed his
punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch from the path, and
climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the other side till the
track joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the ploughed
land ended, and all before him was bleak open down.
III
Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of
it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the
sky. At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green
“ridgeway”—the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the
district. This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and down
almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks and
herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and overgrown.
The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the nestling
hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a railway
station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier, and till
now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat, low-lying country
lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his upland world. The
whole northern semicircle between east and west, to a distance of forty
or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a bluer, moister atmosphere,
evidently, than that he breathed up here.
Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of reddish-grey
brick and tile. It was known as the Brown House by the people of the
locality. He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against
the eaves; and the reflection that the higher he got, the further he
could see, led Jude to stand and regard it. On the slope of the roof
two men were repairing the tiling. He turned into the ridgeway and drew
towards the barn.
When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some time he took
courage, and ascended the ladder till he stood beside them.
“Well, my lad, and what may you want up here?”
“I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is, if you please.”
“Christminster is out across there, by that clump. You can see it—at
least you can on a clear day. Ah, no, you can’t now.”
The other tiler, glad of any kind of diversion from the monotony of his
labour, had also turned to look towards the quarter designated. “You
can’t often see it in weather like this,” he said. “The time I’ve
noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame, and it
looks like—I don’t know what.”
“The heavenly Jerusalem,” suggested the serious urchin.
“Ay—though I should never ha’ thought of it myself. … But I can’t see
no Christminster to-day.”
The boy strained his eyes also; yet neither could he see the far-off
city. He descended from the barn, and abandoning Christminster with the
versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track, looking for any
natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout.
When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he observed that the
ladder was still in its place, but that the men had finished their
day’s work and gone away.
It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint mist, but it had
cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and
along the river-courses. He thought again of Christminster, and wished,
since he had come two or three miles from his aunt’s house on purpose,
that he could have seen for once this attractive city of which he had
been told. But even if he waited here it was hardly likely that the air
would clear before night. Yet he was loth to leave the spot, for the
northern expanse became lost to view on retreating towards the village
only a few hundred yards.
He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had
designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the
tiles. He might not be able to come so far as this for many days.
Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster might be forwarded.
People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even
though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man who
had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down
and prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried
the same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found
afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew.
This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the
third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the
mist might rise.
He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or
fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the
northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter
of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the
sun’s position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out
in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately
looked back in the old direction.
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light
like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the
lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the
vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the
spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly
revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen,
or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.
The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their
shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague
city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that the sun
had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark,
and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.
He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run,
trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in wait
for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his forehead
and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the
bewitched ship. He knew that he had grown out of belief in these
horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in
the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of his birth,
and his great-aunt did not care much about him.
Inside and round about that old woman’s “shop” window, with its
twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of them
oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles
exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong man could
have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time. But
his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he
was always beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened
to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter’s
imagination and less of the diamond merchant’s in his dreams thereof
than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city acquired a
tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one
nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so
much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living among
the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.
In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too,
he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there. Whenever he
could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two,
which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill
and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by the sight
of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which in his
estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.
Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he ascended
to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or two
further, he would see the night lights of the city. It would be
necessary to come back alone, but even that consideration did not deter
him, for he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no doubt.
The project was duly executed. It was not late when he arrived at the
place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east sky,
accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion dark
enough. He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in rows, as
he had half expected. No individual light was visible, only a halo or
glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it,
making the light and the city seem distant but a mile or so.
He set himself to wonder on the exact point in the glow where the
schoolmaster might be—he who never communicated with anybody at
Marygreen now; who was as if dead to them here. In the glow he seemed
to see Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms in
Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.
He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour,
and the fact now came into his mind. He parted his lips as he faced the
north-east, and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor.
“You,” he said, addressing the breeze caressingly “were in
Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating along the
streets, pulling round the weather-cocks, touching Mr. Phillotson’s
face, being breathed by him; and now you are here, breathed by me—you,
the very same.”
Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him—a message
from the place—from some soul residing there, it seemed. Surely it was
the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical, calling
to him, “We are happy here!”
He had become entirely lost to his bodily situation during this mental
leap, and only got back to it by a rough recalling. A few yards below
the brow of the hill on which he paused a team of horses made its
appearance, having reached the place by dint of half an hour’s
serpentine progress from the bottom of the immense declivity. They had
a load of coals behind them—a fuel that could only be got into the
upland by this particular route. They were accompanied by a carter, a
second man, and a boy, who now kicked a large stone behind one of the
wheels, and allowed the panting animals to have a long rest, while
those in charge took a flagon off the load and indulged in a drink
round.
They were elderly men, and had genial voices. Jude addressed them,
inquiring if they had come from Christminster.
“Heaven forbid, with this load!” said they.
“The place I mean is that one yonder.” He was getting so romantically
attached to Christminster that, like a young lover alluding to his
mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name again. He pointed to
the light in the sky—hardly perceptible to their older eyes.
“Yes. There do seem a spot a bit brighter in the nor’-east than
elsewhere, though I shouldn’t ha’ noticed it myself, and no doubt it
med be Christminster.”
Here a little book of tales which Jude had tucked up under his arm,
having brought them to read on his way hither before it grew dark,
slipped and fell into the road. The carter eyed him while he picked it
up and straightened the leaves.
“Ah, young man,” he observed, “you’d have to get your head screwed on
t’other way before you could read what they read there.”
“Why?” asked the boy.
“Oh, they never look at anything that folks like we can understand,”
the carter continued, by way of passing the time. “On’y foreign tongues
used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families spoke
alike. They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir.
’Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion. And
that’s learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, ’tis a
serious-minded place. Not but there’s wenches in the streets o’ nights…
You know, I suppose, that they raise pa’sons there like radishes in a
bed? And though it do take—how many years, Bob?—five years to turn a
lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn preaching man with no
corrupt passions, they’ll do it, if it can be done, and polish un off
like the workmen they be, and turn un out wi’ a long face, and a long
black coat and waistcoat, and a religious collar and hat, same as they
used to wear in the Scriptures, so that his own mother wouldn’t know un
sometimes. … There, ’tis their business, like anybody else’s.”
“But how should you know”
“Now don’t you interrupt, my boy. Never interrupt your senyers. Move
the fore hoss aside, Bobby; here’s som’at coming… You must mind that I
be a-talking of the college life. ’Em lives on a lofty level; there’s
no gainsaying it, though I myself med not think much of ’em. As we be
here in our bodies on this high ground, so be they in their
minds—noble-minded men enough, no doubt—some on ’em—able to earn
hundreds by thinking out loud. And some on ’em be strong young fellows
that can earn a’most as much in silver cups. As for music, there’s
beautiful music everywhere in Christminster. You med be religious, or
you med not, but you can’t help striking in your homely note with the
rest. And there’s a street in the place—the main street—that ha’n’t
another like it in the world. I should think I did know a little about
Christminster!”
By this time the horses had recovered breath and bent to their collars
again. Jude, throwing a last adoring look at the distant halo, turned
and walked beside his remarkably well-informed friend, who had no
objection to telling him as they moved on more yet of the city—its
towers and halls and churches. The waggon turned into a cross-road,
whereupon Jude thanked the carter warmly for his information, and said
he only wished he could talk half as well about Christminster as he.
“Well, ’tis oonly what has come in my way,” said the carter
unboastfully. “I’ve never been there, no more than you; but I’ve picked
up the knowledge here and there, and you be welcome to it. A-getting
about the world as I do, and mixing with all classes of society, one
can’t help hearing of things. A friend o’ mine, that used to clane the
boots at the Crozier Hotel in Christminster when he was in his prime,
why, I knowed un as well as my own brother in his later years.”
Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that he
forgot to feel timid. He suddenly grew older. It had been the yearning
of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to—for some place
which he could call admirable. Should he find that place in this city
if he could get there? Would it be a spot in which, without fear of
farmers, or hindrance, or ridicule, he could watch and wait, and set
himself to some mighty undertaking like the men of old of whom he had
heard? As the halo had been to his eyes when gazing at it a quarter of
an hour earlier, so was the spot mentally to him as he pursued his dark
way.
“It is a city of light,” he said to himself.
“The tree of knowledge grows there,” he added a few steps further on.
“It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to.”
“It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion.”
After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:
“It would just suit me.”
IV
Walking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration, the boy—an
ancient man in some phases of thought, much younger than his years in
others—was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom,
notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an
extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain that
danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner
swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots. Jude,
beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.
“Well, my man! I’m in a hurry, so you’ll have to walk pretty fast if
you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?”
“Ah—I’m known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public
benefactor.”
Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic
population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed, took
care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers formed his
only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His
position was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the
quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising. He was, in
fact, a survival. The distances he traversed on foot were enormous, and
extended nearly the whole length and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one
day seen him selling a pot of coloured lard to an old woman as a
certain cure for a bad leg, the woman arranging to pay a guinea, in
instalments of a shilling a fortnight, for the precious salve, which,
according to the physician, could only be obtained from a particular
animal which grazed on Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at
great risk to life and limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts
about this gentleman’s medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a
travelled personage, and one who might be a trustworthy source of
information on matters not strictly professional.
“I s’pose you’ve been to Christminster, Physician?”
“I have—many times,” replied the long thin man. “That’s one of my
centres.”
“It’s a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?”
“You’d say so, my boy, if you’d seen it. Why, the very sons of the old
women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin—not good
Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin—cat-Latin, as we used to
call it in my undergraduate days.”
“And Greek?”
“Well—that’s more for the men who are in training for bishops, that
they may be able to read the New Testament in the original.”
“I want to learn Latin and Greek myself.”
“A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue.”
“I mean to go to Christminster some day.”
“Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only proprietor
of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all disorders of the
alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness of breath. Two and
threepence a box—specially licensed by the government stamp.”
“Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?”
“I’ll sell you mine with pleasure—those I used as a student.”
“Oh, thank you, sir!” said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for the
amazing speed of the physician’s walk kept him in a dog-trot which was
giving him a stitch in the side.
“I think you’d better drop behind, my young man. Now I’ll tell you what
I’ll do. I’ll get you the grammars, and give you a first lesson, if
you’ll remember, at every house in the village, to recommend Physician
Vilbert’s golden ointment, life-drops, and female pills.”
“Where will you be with the grammars?”
“I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of
five-and-twenty minutes past seven. My movements are as truly timed as
those of the planets in their courses.”
“Here I’ll be to meet you,” said Jude.
“With orders for my medicines?”
“Yes, Physician.”
Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to recover breath, and
went home with a consciousness of having struck a blow for
Christminster.
Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly at
his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to
him—smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to
spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a
supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures, giving
rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.
He honestly performed his promise to the man of many cures, in whom he
now sincerely believed, walking miles hither and thither among the
surrounding hamlets as the Physician’s agent in advance. On the evening
appointed he stood motionless on the plateau, at the place where he had
parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach. The road-physician
was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of Jude on striking into
his pace, which the pedestrian did not diminish by a single unit of
force, the latter seemed hardly to recognize his young companion,
though with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings had grown light.
Jude thought it might perhaps be owing to his wearing another hat, and
he saluted the physician with dignity.
“Well, my boy?” said the latter abstractedly.
“I’ve come,” said Jude.
“You? who are you? Oh yes—to be sure! Got any orders, lad?”
“Yes.” And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers who
were willing to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and salve.
The quack mentally registered these with great care.
“And the Latin and Greek grammars?” Jude’s voice trembled with anxiety.
“What about them?”
“You were to bring me yours, that you used before you took your
degree.”
“Ah, yes, yes! Forgot all about it—all! So many lives depending on my
attention, you see, my man, that I can’t give so much thought as I
would like to other things.”
Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of the truth;
and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, “You haven’t brought ’em!”
“No. But you must get me some more orders from sick people, and I’ll
bring the grammars next time.”
Jude dropped behind. He was an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of
sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him all
at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of. There was to be no
intellectual light from this source. The leaves dropped from his
imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it, and
cried bitterly.
The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness. He might,
perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do that
required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and though
physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as to be
without a farthing of his own.
At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it gave Jude a
lead. Why should he not write to the schoolmaster, and ask him to be so
kind as to get him the grammars in Christminster? He might slip a
letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach
the desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand copies,
which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university
atmosphere?
To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it. It was
necessary to act alone.
After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the day
of the piano’s departure, which happened to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to
his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his
aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to
abandon his scheme.
The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling every
morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was stirring.
At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he saw from the
ends of it that it contained two thin books. He took it away into a
lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.
Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue
of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him,
by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech
into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a
pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere
known as Grimm’s Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal
completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language
were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given
language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being
furnished by the books aforesaid.
When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to the
Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.
The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wantonly
over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress,
and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day.
But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the first
time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had
supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not
recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be
individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.
Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an
hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and
watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of
the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion!
The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like
that of Israel in Egypt.
What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that
he had never been born.
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his
trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were
further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come,
because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic
error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
V
During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular vehicle
might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads near
Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books Jude had
grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages. In
fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a
while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of
Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of
such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a
herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest
in it than in the presupposed patent process. The mountain-weight of
material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the
classics piqued him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to
move it piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty maiden
aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the business of
the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence. An aged horse with
a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at a sale, a
creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few pounds more,
and in this turn-out it became Jude’s business thrice a week to carry
loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters immediately round
Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance itself
than in Jude’s manner of conducting it along its route. Its interior
was the scene of most of Jude’s education by “private study.” As soon
as the horse had learnt the road and the houses at which he was to
pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his
arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt,
the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and
plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the
case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure
of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears;
yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read, and divining rather
than beholding the spirit of the original, which often to his mind was
something else than that which he was taught to look for.
The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin
editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap. But, bad
for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were passably good for
him. The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the
marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as
he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be
passing by. And though Jude may have had little chance of becoming a
scholar by these rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting
into the groove he wished to follow.
While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already been
thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of
these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse pursued his
rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the stoppage
of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, “Two to-day, baker,
and I return this stale one.”
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without
his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood began
to talk about his method of combining work and play (such they
considered his reading to be), which, though probably convenient enough
to himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other travellers
along the same roads. There were murmurs. Then a private resident of an
adjoining place informed the local policeman that the baker’s boy
should not be allowed to read while driving, and insisted that it was
the constable’s duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the
police court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous practices
on the highway. The policeman thereupon lay in wait for Jude, and one
day accosted him and cautioned him.
As Jude had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to heat the oven,
and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the day, he
was obliged to go to bed at night immediately after laying the sponge;
so that if he could not read his classics on the highways he could
hardly study at all. The only thing to be done was, therefore, to keep
a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could in the
circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as anybody loomed in the
distance, the policeman in particular. To do that official justice, he
did not put himself much in the way of Jude’s bread-cart, considering
that in such a lonely district the chief danger was to Jude himself,
and often on seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in
another direction.
On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about
sixteen, and had been stumbling through the “Carmen Sæculare,” on his
way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of the
plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was the sense
of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down, and
the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the
opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem
that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had
caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and
glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the
roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the shiny goddess, who
seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the
disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began:
“Phœbe silvarumque potens Diana!”
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude
repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never
have thought of humouring in broad daylight.
Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or
acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to
such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next to
being a scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of reading
heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the more convinced
he was of his inconsistency. He began to wonder whether he could be
reading quite the right books for his object in life. Certainly there
seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval
colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken up
a wrong emotion for a Christian young man. He had dabbled in Clarke’s
Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament in the Greek,
though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a second-hand
bookseller. He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a new dialect, and
for a long time onward limited his reading almost entirely to the
Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach’s text. Moreover, on going into
Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic literature by
finding at the bookseller’s some volumes of the Fathers which had been
left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.
As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all
the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on
fifteenth-century brasses and tombs. On one of these pilgrimages he met
with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence, who read
everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet of the
romantic charms of the city of light and lore. Thither he resolved as
firmly as ever to go.
But how live in that city? At present he had no income at all. He had
no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he
could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might
spread over many years.
What was most required by citizens? Food, clothing, and shelter. An
income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for
making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third
requisite he inclined to. They built in a city; therefore he would
learn to build. He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin Susanna’s
father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow mediæval art in
any material was a trade for which he had rather a fancy. He could not
go far wrong in following his uncle’s footsteps, and engaging himself
awhile with the carcases that contained the scholar souls.
As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone, metal not
being available, and suspending his studies awhile, occupied his spare
half-hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish church.
There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston, and as soon as
he had found a substitute for himself in his aunt’s little business, he
offered his services to this man for a trifling wage. Here Jude had the
opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of freestone-working.
Some time later he went to a church-builder in the same place, and
under the architect’s direction became handy at restoring the
dilapidated masonries of several village churches round about.
Not forgetting that he was only following up this handicraft as a prop
to lean on while he prepared those greater engines which he flattered
himself would be better fitted for him, he yet was interested in his
pursuit on its own account. He now had lodgings during the week in the
little town, whence he returned to Marygreen village every Saturday
evening. And thus he reached and passed his nineteenth year.
VI
At this memorable date of his life he was, one Saturday, returning from
Alfredston to Marygreen about three o’clock in the afternoon. It was
fine, warm, and soft summer weather, and he walked with his tools at
his back, his little chisels clinking faintly against the larger ones
in his basket. It being the end of the week he had left work early, and
had come out of the town by a round-about route which he did not
usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour-mill near
Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.
He was in an enthusiastic mood. He seemed to see his way to living
comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two, and
knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of which
he had dreamed so much. He might, of course, have gone there now, in
some capacity or other, but he preferred to enter the city with a
little more assurance as to means than he could be said to feel at
present. A warm self-content suffused him when he considered what he
had already done. Now and then as he went along he turned to face the
peeps of country on either side of him. But he hardly saw them; the act
was an automatic repetition of what he had been accustomed to do when
less occupied; and the one matter which really engaged him was the
mental estimate of his progress thus far.
“I have acquired quite an average student’s power to read the common
ancient classics, Latin in particular.” This was true, Jude possessing
a facility in that language which enabled him with great ease to
himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary conversations therein.
“I have read two books of the _Iliad_, besides being pretty familiar
with passages such as the speech of Phœnix in the ninth book, the fight
of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth, the appearance of Achilles
unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth, and the funeral
games in the twenty-third. I have also done some Hesiod, a little scrap
of Thucydides, and a lot of the Greek Testament… I wish there was only
one dialect all the same.
“I have done some mathematics, including the first six and the eleventh
and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as far as simple equations.
“I know something of the Fathers, and something of Roman and English
history.
“These things are only a beginning. But I shall not make much farther
advance here, from the difficulty of getting books. Hence I must next
concentrate all my energies on settling in Christminster. Once there I
shall so advance, with the assistance I shall there get, that my
present knowledge will appear to me but as childish ignorance. I must
save money, and I will; and one of those colleges shall open its doors
to me—shall welcome whom now it would spurn, if I wait twenty years for
the welcome.
“I’ll be D.D. before I have done!”
And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a
bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. And what an
example he would set! If his income were £5000 a year, he would give
away £4500 in one form and another, and live sumptuously (for him) on
the remainder. Well, on second thoughts, a bishop was absurd. He would
draw the line at an archdeacon. Perhaps a man could be as good and as
learned and as useful in the capacity of archdeacon as in that of
bishop. Yet he thought of the bishop again.
“Meanwhile I will read, as soon as I am settled in Christminster, the
books I have not been able to get hold of here: Livy, Tacitus,
Herodotus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes—”
“Ha, ha, ha! Hoity-toity!” The sounds were expressed in light voices on
the other side of the hedge, but he did not notice them. His thoughts
went on:
“—Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus.
Then I must master other things: the Fathers thoroughly; Bede and
ecclesiastical history generally; a smattering of Hebrew—I only know
the letters as yet—”
“Hoity-toity!”
“—but I can work hard. I have staying power in abundance, thank God!
and it is that which tells… Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater;
and I’ll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased.”
In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude’s
walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the
ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern. On
a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware
that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his
feet.
A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part
of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as
it was useless for any other purpose. Pigs were rather plentiful
hereabout, being bred and fattened in large numbers in certain parts of
North Wessex.
On the other side of the hedge was a stream, whence, as he now for the
first time realized, had come the slight sounds of voices and laughter
that had mingled with his dreams. He mounted the bank and looked over
the fence. On the further side of the stream stood a small homestead,
having a garden and pig-sties attached; in front of it, beside the
brook, three young women were kneeling, with buckets and platters
beside them containing heaps of pigs’ chitterlings, which they were
washing in the running water. One or two pairs of eyes slyly glanced
up, and perceiving that his attention had at last been attracted, and
that he was watching them, they braced themselves for inspection by
putting their mouths demurely into shape and recommencing their rinsing
operations with assiduity.
“Thank you!” said Jude severely.
“I _didn’t_ throw it, I tell you!” asserted one girl to her neighbour,
as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.
“Nor I,” the second answered.
“Oh, Anny, how can you!” said the third.
“If I had thrown anything at all, it shouldn’t have been _that_!”
“Pooh! I don’t care for him!” And they laughed and continued their
work, without looking up, still ostentatiously accusing each other.
Jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face, and caught their remarks.
“_You_ didn’t do it—oh no!” he said to the up-stream one of the three.
She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl, not exactly handsome,
but capable of passing as such at a little distance, despite some
coarseness of skin and fibre. She had a round and prominent bosom, full
lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen’s egg. She
was a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less; and Jude
was almost certain that to her was attributable the enterprise of
attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters to what was
simmering in the minds around him.
“That you’ll never be told,” said she deedily.
“Whoever did it was wasteful of other people’s property.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.”
“But you want to speak to me, I suppose?”
“Oh yes; if you like to.”
“Shall I clamber across, or will you come to the plank above here?”
Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity; for somehow or other the eyes of
the brown girl rested in his own when he had said the words, and there
was a momentary flash of intelligence, a dumb announcement of affinity
_in posse_ between herself and him, which, so far as Jude Fawley was
concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it. She saw that he had
singled her out from the three, as a woman is singled out in such
cases, for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in
commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters,
unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of
their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.
Springing to her feet, she said: “Bring back what is lying there.”
Jude was now aware that no message on any matter connected with her
father’s business had prompted her signal to him. He set down his
basket of tools, picked up the scrap of offal, beat a pathway for
himself with his stick, and got over the hedge. They walked in parallel
lines, one on each bank of the stream, towards the small plank bridge.
As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave without Jude perceiving it, an
adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession,
by which curious and original manœuvre she brought as by magic upon its
smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to
retain there as long as she continued to smile. This production of
dimples at will was a not unknown operation, which many attempted, but
only a few succeeded in accomplishing.
They met in the middle of the plank, and Jude, tossing back her
missile, seemed to expect her to explain why she had audaciously
stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him.
But she, slyly looking in another direction, swayed herself backwards
and forwards on her hand as it clutched the rail of the bridge; till,
moved by amatory curiosity, she turned her eyes critically upon him.
“You don’t think _I_ would shy things at you?”
“Oh no.”
“We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn’t want anything
thrown away. He makes that into dubbin.” She nodded towards the
fragment on the grass.
“What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?” Jude asked,
politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as to
its truth.
“Impudence. Don’t tell folk it was I, mind!”
“How can I? I don’t know your name.”
“Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?”
“Do!”
“Arabella Donn. I’m living here.”
“I must have known it if I had often come this way. But I mostly go
straight along the high-road.”
“My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me wash the
innerds for black-puddings and such like.”
They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding
each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge. The
unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly by
Arabella’s personality, held Jude to the spot against his
intention—almost against his will, and in a way new to his experience.
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had
never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely
regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from
her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked
arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble.
“What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words had
not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.
“Ah, you should see me Sundays!” she said piquantly.
“I don’t suppose I could?” he answered
“That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just now, though
there med be in a week or two.” She had spoken this without a smile,
and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. “Will you
let me?”
“I don’t mind.”
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning her face
aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation
before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than a general
impression of her appearance. “Next Sunday?” he hazarded. “To-morrow,
that is?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I call?”
“Yes.”
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost tenderly
with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the brookside
grass rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,
filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had just
inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been
hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had
somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.
The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so
precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a
curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.
“Well, it’s only a bit of fun,” he said to himself, faintly conscious
that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more
obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had drawn
him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere
sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her
quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with
literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no
vestal who chose _that_ missile for opening her attack on him. He saw
this with his intellectual eye, just for a short fleeting while, as by
the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on
a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then this passing
discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to all conditions
of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that of having
found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto unsuspected, though
it had lain close beside him. He was to meet this enkindling one of the
other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently resumed
her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid stream.
“Catched un, my dear?” laconically asked the girl called Anny.
“I don’t know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!”
regretfully murmured Arabella.
“Lord! he’s nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old
Drusilla Fawley’s bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he ’prenticed
himself at Alfredston. Since then he’s been very stuck up, and always
reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say.”
“Oh, I don’t care what he is, or anything about ’n. Don’t you think it,
my child!”
“Oh, don’t ye! You needn’t try to deceive us! What did you stay talking
to him for, if you didn’t want un? Whether you do or whether you don’t,
he’s as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted on the bridge,
when he looked at ’ee as if he had never seen a woman before in his
born days. Well, he’s to be had by any woman who can get him to care
for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him the right way.”
VII
The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping
ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black mark
on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past
months.
It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with
Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to
set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,—the re-reading of his
Greek Testament—his new one, with better type than his old copy,
following Griesbach’s text as amended by numerous correctors, and with
variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the book, having
obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing he had
never done before.
He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading, under the
quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he now slept
only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened
yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt
as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot
understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.
He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened the
book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands to
his temples, began at the beginning:
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ.
Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait indoors,
poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him. There was a
something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from promises. He
ought not to break faith with her. Even though he had only Sundays and
week-day evenings for reading he could afford one afternoon, seeing
that other young men afforded so many. After to-day he would never
probably see her again. Indeed, it would be impossible, considering
what his plans were.
In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular
power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the
spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care
little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated
intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy
he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the
embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had
nothing in common with his own except locality.
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude sprang up
and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed
himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house
and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground
which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the
dip beyond the upland.
As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours,
easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading
after tea.
Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path joined
the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left, descending
the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown House. Here at
the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it,
and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of
piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the originators of
that smell. He entered the garden, and knocked at the door with the
knob of his stick.
Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on the
inside said:
“Arabella! Here’s your young man come coorting! Mizzle, my girl!”
Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a businesslike aspect as it
evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking of. He
was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her; but “courting” was too
coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas. The door
was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs in radiant
walking attire.
“Take a chair, Mr. What’s-your-name?” said her father, an energetic,
black-whiskered man, in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard from
outside.
“I’d rather go out at once, wouldn’t you?” she whispered to Jude.
“Yes,” said he. “We’ll walk up to the Brown House and back, we can do
it in half an hour.”
Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt
glad he had come, and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto
haunted him.
First they clambered to the top of the great down, during which ascent
he had occasionally to take her hand to assist her. Then they bore off
to the left along the crest into the ridgeway, which they followed till
it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of
his former fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them
now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella with greater
zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies with
all the Dons in the recently adored university, and passed the spot
where he had knelt to Diana and Phœbus without remembering that there
were any such people in the mythology, or that the sun was anything
else than a useful lamp for illuminating Arabella’s face. An
indescribable lightness of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the
incipient scholar, prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not,
felt himself honoured and glorified by the condescension of this
handsome country wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her
Sunday frock and ribbons.
They reached the Brown House barn—the point at which he had planned to
turn back. While looking over the vast northern landscape from this
spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke from the
neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a distance
of a couple of miles.
“It is a fire,” said Arabella. “Let’s run and see it—do! It is not
far!”
The tenderness which had grown up in Jude’s bosom left him no will to
thwart her inclination now—which pleased him in affording him excuse
for a longer time with her. They started off down the hill almost at a
trot; but on gaining level ground at the bottom, and walking a mile,
they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than it had
seemed.
Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on; but it was not
till five o’clock that they found themselves on the scene,—the distance
being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen, and three
from Arabella’s. The conflagration had been got under by the time they
reached it, and after a short inspection of the melancholy ruins they
retraced their steps—their course lying through the town of Alfredston.
Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered an inn of an
inferior class, and gave their order. As it was not for beer they had a
long time to wait. The maid-servant recognized Jude, and whispered her
surprise to her mistress in the background, that he, the student “who
kept hisself up so particular,” should have suddenly descended so low
as to keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was being
said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her
lover—the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is
winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and
Delilah which hung on the wall, and at the circular beer-stains on the
table, and at the spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust. The whole
aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which few places
can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when the setting sun is
slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the unfortunate wayfarer finds
himself with no other haven of rest.
It began to grow dusk. They could not wait longer, really, for the tea,
they said. “Yet what else can we do?” asked Jude. “It is a three-mile
walk for you.”
“I suppose we can have some beer,” said Arabella.
“Beer, oh yes. I had forgotten that. Somehow it seems odd to come to a
public-house for beer on a Sunday evening.”
“But we didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t.” Jude by this time wished he was out of such an
uncongenial atmosphere; but he ordered the beer, which was promptly
brought.
Arabella tasted it. “Ugh!” she said.
Jude tasted. “What’s the matter with it?” he asked. “I don’t understand
beer very much now, it is true. I like it well enough, but it is bad to
read on, and I find coffee better. But this seems all right.”
“Adulterated—I can’t touch it!” She mentioned three or four ingredients
that she detected in the liquor beyond malt and hops, much to Jude’s
surprise.
“How much you know!” he said good-humouredly.
Nevertheless she returned to the beer and drank her share, and they
went on their way. It was now nearly dark, and as soon as they had
withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer together, till
they touched each other. She wondered why he did not put his arm round
her waist, but he did not; he merely said what to himself seemed a
quite bold enough thing: “Take my arm.”
She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder. He felt the warmth of her
body against his, and putting his stick under his other arm held with
his right hand her right as it rested in its place.
“Now we are well together, dear, aren’t we?” he observed.
“Yes,” said she; adding to herself: “Rather mild!”
“How fast I have become!” he was thinking.
Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland, where they
could see the white highway ascending before them in the gloom. From
this point the only way of getting to Arabella’s was by going up the
incline, and dipping again into her valley on the right. Before they
had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been
walking on the grass unseen.
“These lovers—you find ’em out o’ doors in all seasons and
weathers—lovers and homeless dogs only,” said one of the men as they
vanished down the hill.
Arabella tittered lightly.
“Are we lovers?” asked Jude.
“You know best.”
“But you can tell me?”
For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder. Jude took the hint,
and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled her to him and kissed
her.
They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had desired, clasped
together. After all, what did it matter since it was dark, said Jude to
himself. When they were half-way up the long hill they paused as by
arrangement, and he kissed her again. They reached the top, and he
kissed her once more.
“You can keep your arm there, if you would like to,” she said gently.
He did so, thinking how trusting she was.
Thus they slowly went towards her home. He had left his cottage at
half-past three, intending to be sitting down again to the New
Testament by half-past five. It was nine o’clock when, with another
embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father’s door.
She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so odd
otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave way,
and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he found, in
addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round. They all
spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as Arabella’s
intended partner.
They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place and
embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleasant
walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay
longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet woman without
features or character; and bidding them all good night plunged with a
sense of relief into the track over the down.
But that sense was only temporary: Arabella soon re-asserted her sway
in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man from the
Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him? what were his
intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single
minute of time day by day? “Wasting!” It depended on your point of view
to define that: he was just living for the first time: not wasting
life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson;
ay, or a pope!
When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a general
consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things
confronting him. He went upstairs without a light, and the dim interior
of his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his book open,
just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-page
regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the
unclosed eyes of a dead man:
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ.
* * * * * * * * *
Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of absence at
lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that he threw into his
basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had
brought with him.
He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself. Arabella,
on the contrary, made them public among all her friends and
acquaintances.
Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours
earlier under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his side, he
reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and stood
still. He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss. As the
sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed there
since. Jude looked on the ground and sighed. He looked closely, and
could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of their feet as they
had stood locked in each other’s arms. She was not there now, and “the
embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of nature” so depicted her
past presence that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill. A
pollard willow stood close to the place, and that willow was different
from all other willows in the world. Utter annihilation of the six days
which must elapse before he could see her again as he had promised
would have been his intensest wish if he had had only the week to live.
An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way with her two
companions of the Saturday. She passed unheedingly the scene of the
kiss, and the willow that marked it, though chattering freely on the
subject to the other two.
“And what did he tell ’ee next?”
“Then he said—” And she related almost word for word some of his
tenderest speeches. If Jude had been behind the fence he would have
felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings and
doings on the previous evening were private.
“You’ve got him to care for ’ee a bit, ’nation if you han’t!” murmured
Anny judicially. “It’s well to be you!”
In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low, hungry tone of
latent sensuousness: “I’ve got him to care for me: yes! But I want him
to more than care for me; I want him to have me—to marry me! I must
have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I
shall go mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether! I felt I should
when I first saw him!”
“As he is a romancing, straightfor’ard, honest chap, he’s to be had,
and as a husband, if you set about catching him in the right way.”
Arabella remained thinking awhile. “What med be the right way?” she
asked.
“Oh you don’t know—you don’t!” said Sarah, the third girl.
“On my word I don’t!—No further, that is, than by plain courting, and
taking care he don’t go too far!”
The third girl looked at the second. “She _don’t_ know!”
“’Tis clear she don’t!” said Anny.
“And having lived in a town, too, as one may say! Well, we can teach
’ee som’at then, as well as you us.”
“Yes. And how do you mean—a sure way to gain a man? Take me for an
innocent, and have done wi’ it!”
“As a husband.”
“As a husband.”
“A countryman that’s honourable and serious-minded such as he; God
forbid that I should say a sojer, or sailor, or commercial gent from
the towns, or any of them that be slippery with poor women! I’d do no
friend that harm!”
“Well, such as he, of course!”
Arabella’s companions looked at each other, and turning up their eyes
in drollery began smirking. Then one went up close to Arabella, and,
although nobody was near, imparted some information in a low tone, the
other observing curiously the effect upon Arabella.
“Ah!” said the last-named slowly. “I own I didn’t think of that way! …
But suppose he _isn’t_ honourable? A woman had better not have tried
it!”
“Nothing venture nothing have! Besides, you make sure that he’s
honourable before you begin. You’d be safe enough with yours. I wish I
had the chance! Lots of girls do it; or do you think they’d get married
at all?”
Arabella pursued her way in silent thought. “I’ll try it!” she
whispered; but not to them.
VIII
One week’s end Jude was as usual walking out to his aunt’s at Marygreen
from his lodging in Alfredston, a walk which now had large attractions
for him quite other than his desire to see his aged and morose
relative. He diverged to the right before ascending the hill with the
single purpose of gaining, on his way, a glimpse of Arabella that
should not come into the reckoning of regular appointments. Before
quite reaching the homestead his alert eye perceived the top of her
head moving quickly hither and thither over the garden hedge. Entering
the gate he found that three young unfattened pigs had escaped from
their sty by leaping clean over the top, and that she was endeavouring
unassisted to drive them in through the door which she had set open.
The lines of her countenance changed from the rigidity of business to
the softness of love when she saw Jude, and she bent her eyes
languishingly upon him. The animals took advantage of the pause by
doubling and bolting out of the way.
“They were only put in this morning!” she cried, stimulated to pursue
in spite of her lover’s presence. “They were drove from Spaddleholt
Farm only yesterday, where Father bought ’em at a stiff price enough.
They are wanting to get home again, the stupid toads! Will you shut the
garden gate, dear, and help me to get ’em in. There are no men folk at
home, only Mother, and they’ll be lost if we don’t mind.”
He set himself to assist, and dodged this way and that over the potato
rows and the cabbages. Every now and then they ran together, when he
caught her for a moment and kissed her. The first pig was got back
promptly; the second with some difficulty; the third a long-legged
creature, was more obstinate and agile. He plunged through a hole in
the garden hedge, and into the lane.
“He’ll be lost if I don’t follow ’n!” said she. “Come along with me!”
She rushed in full pursuit out of the garden, Jude alongside her,
barely contriving to keep the fugitive in sight. Occasionally they
would shout to some boy to stop the animal, but he always wriggled past
and ran on as before.
“Let me take your hand, darling,” said Jude. “You are getting out of
breath.” She gave him her now hot hand with apparent willingness, and
they trotted along together.
“This comes of driving ’em home,” she remarked. “They always know the
way back if you do that. They ought to have been carted over.”
By this time the pig had reached an unfastened gate admitting to the
open down, across which he sped with all the agility his little legs
afforded. As soon as the pursuers had entered and ascended to the top
of the high ground it became apparent that they would have to run all
the way to the farmer’s if they wished to get at him. From this summit
he could be seen as a minute speck, following an unerring line towards
his old home.
“It is no good!” cried Arabella. “He’ll be there long before we get
there. It don’t matter now we know he’s not lost or stolen on the way.
They’ll see it is ours, and send un back. Oh dear, how hot I be!”
Without relinquishing her hold of Jude’s hand she swerved aside and
flung herself down on the sod under a stunted thorn, precipitately
pulling Jude on to his knees at the same time.
“Oh, I ask pardon—I nearly threw you down, didn’t I! But I am so
tired!”
She lay supine, and straight as an arrow, on the sloping sod of this
hill-top, gazing up into the blue miles of sky, and still retaining her
warm hold of Jude’s hand. He reclined on his elbow near her.
“We’ve run all this way for nothing,” she went on, her form heaving and
falling in quick pants, her face flushed, her full red lips parted, and
a fine dew of perspiration on her skin. “Well—why don’t you speak,
deary?”
“I’m blown too. It was all up hill.”
They were in absolute solitude—the most apparent of all solitudes, that
of empty surrounding space. Nobody could be nearer than a mile to them
without their seeing him. They were, in fact, on one of the summits of
the county, and the distant landscape around Christminster could be
discerned from where they lay. But Jude did not think of that then.
“Oh, I can see such a pretty thing up this tree,” said Arabella. “A
sort of a—caterpillar, of the most loveliest green and yellow you ever
came across!”
“Where?” said Jude, sitting up.
“You can’t see him there—you must come here,” said she.
He bent nearer and put his head in front of hers. “No—I can’t see it,”
he said.
“Why, on the limb there where it branches off—close to the moving
leaf—there!” She gently pulled him down beside her.
“I don’t see it,” he repeated, the back of his head against her cheek.
“But I can, perhaps, standing up.” He stood accordingly, placing
himself in the direct line of her gaze.
“How stupid you are!” she said crossly, turning away her face.
“I don’t care to see it, dear: why should I?” he replied looking down
upon her. “Get up, Abby.”
“Why?”
“I want you to let me kiss you. I’ve been waiting to ever so long!”
She rolled round her face, remained a moment looking deedily aslant at
him; then with a slight curl of the lip sprang to her feet, and
exclaiming abruptly “I must mizzle!” walked off quickly homeward. Jude
followed and rejoined her.
“Just one!” he coaxed.
“Shan’t!” she said.
He, surprised: “What’s the matter?”
She kept her two lips resentfully together, and Jude followed her like
a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him, talking
calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if he tried to
take her hand or clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts
of her father’s homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to
him with a supercilious, affronted air.
“I expect I took too much liberty with her, somehow,” Jude said to
himself, as he withdrew with a sigh and went on to Marygreen.
On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella’s home was, as usual, the
scene of a grand weekly cooking, the preparation of the special Sunday
dinner. Her father was shaving before a little glass hung on the
mullion of the window, and her mother and Arabella herself were
shelling beans hard by. A neighbour passed on her way home from morning
service at the nearest church, and seeing Donn engaged at the window
with the razor, nodded and came in.
She at once spoke playfully to Arabella: “I zeed ’ee running with
’un—hee-hee! I hope ’tis coming to something?”
Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her face without
raising her eyes.
“He’s for Christminster, I hear, as soon as he can get there.”
“Have you heard that lately—quite lately?” asked Arabella with a
jealous, tigerish indrawing of breath.
“Oh no! But it has been known a long time that it is his plan. He’s
on’y waiting here for an opening. Ah well: he must walk about with
somebody, I s’pose. Young men don’t mean much now-a-days. ’Tis a sip
here and a sip there with ’em. ’Twas different in my time.”
When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly to her mother: “I
want you and Father to go and inquire how the Edlins be, this evening
after tea. Or no—there’s evening service at Fensworth—you can walk to
that.”
“Oh? What’s up to-night, then?”
“Nothing. Only I want the house to myself. He’s shy; and I can’t get un
to come in when you are here. I shall let him slip through my fingers
if I don’t mind, much as I care for ’n!”
“If it is fine we med as well go, since you wish.”
In the afternoon Arabella met and walked with Jude, who had now for
weeks ceased to look into a book of Greek, Latin, or any other tongue.
They wandered up the slopes till they reached the green track along the
ridge, which they followed to the circular British earth-bank
adjoining, Jude thinking of the great age of the trackway, and of the
drovers who had frequented it, probably before the Romans knew the
country. Up from the level lands below them floated the chime of church
bells. Presently they were reduced to one note, which quickened, and
stopped.
“Now we’ll go back,” said Arabella, who had attended to the sounds.
Jude assented. So long as he was near her he minded little where he
was. When they arrived at her house he said lingeringly: “I won’t come
in. Why are you in such a hurry to go in to-night? It is not near
dark.”
“Wait a moment,” said she. She tried the handle of the door and found
it locked.
“Ah—they are gone to church,” she added. And searching behind the
scraper she found the key and unlocked the door. “Now, you’ll come in a
moment?” she asked lightly. “We shall be all alone.”
“Certainly,” said Jude with alacrity, the case being unexpectedly
altered.
Indoors they went. Did he want any tea? No, it was too late: he would
rather sit and talk to her. She took off her jacket and hat, and they
sat down—naturally enough close together.
“Don’t touch me, please,” she said softly. “I am part egg-shell. Or
perhaps I had better put it in a safe place.” She began unfastening the
collar of her gown.
“What is it?” said her lover.
“An egg—a cochin’s egg. I am hatching a very rare sort. I carry it
about everywhere with me, and it will get hatched in less than three
weeks.”
“Where do you carry it?”
“Just here.” She put her hand into her bosom and drew out the egg,
which was wrapped in wool, outside it being a piece of pig’s bladder,
in case of accidents. Having exhibited it to him she put it back, “Now
mind you don’t come near me. I don’t want to get it broke, and have to
begin another.”
“Why do you do such a strange thing?”
“It’s an old custom. I suppose it is natural for a woman to want to
bring live things into the world.”
“It is very awkward for me just now,” he said, laughing.
“It serves you right. There—that’s all you can have of me”
She had turned round her chair, and, reaching over the back of it,
presented her cheek to him gingerly.
“That’s very shabby of you!”
“You should have catched me a minute ago when I had put the egg down!
There!” she said defiantly, “I am without it now!” She had quickly
withdrawn the egg a second time; but before he could quite reach her
she had put it back as quickly, laughing with the excitement of her
strategy. Then there was a little struggle, Jude making a plunge for it
and capturing it triumphantly. Her face flushed; and becoming suddenly
conscious he flushed also.
They looked at each other, panting; till he rose and said: “One kiss,
now I can do it without damage to property; and I’ll go!”
But she had jumped up too. “You must find me first!” she cried.
Her lover followed her as she withdrew. It was now dark inside the
room, and the window being small he could not discover for a long time
what had become of her, till a laugh revealed her to have rushed up the
stairs, whither Jude rushed at her heels.
IX
It was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatisfied; she was
always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.
One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she had
grown brighter. That evening she kept an appointment with Jude, who
seemed sad.
“I am going away,” he said to her. “I think I ought to go. I think it
will be better both for you and for me. I wish some things had never
begun! I was much to blame, I know. But it is never too late to mend.”
Arabella began to cry. “How do you know it is not too late?” she said.
“That’s all very well to say! I haven’t told you yet!” and she looked
into his face with streaming eyes.
“What?” he asked, turning pale. “Not…?”
“Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?”
“Oh, Arabella—how can you say that, my dear! You _know_ I wouldn’t
desert you!”
“Well then—”
“I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have
thought of this before… But, of course if that’s the case, we must
marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?”
“I thought—I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the more for
that, and leave me to face it alone!”
“You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or even
three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans—I mean my
plans before I knew you, my dear. But what are they, after all! Dreams
about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships, and all that.
Certainly we’ll marry: we must!”
That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing. He
knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that Arabella
was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind. Yet, such being
the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had
drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done,
he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences.
For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of
her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he
sometimes said laconically.
The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. The people of
the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was. All his
reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his books to
buy saucepans. Those who guessed the probable state of affairs,
Arabella’s parents being among them, declared that it was the sort of
conduct they would have expected of such an honest young man as Jude in
reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent sweetheart. The parson
who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too. And so, standing
before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time
of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe,
feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired
during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the
undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at
what they swore.
Fawley’s aunt being a baker she made him a bride-cake, saying bitterly
that it was the last thing she could do for him, poor silly fellow; and
that it would have been far better if, instead of his living to trouble
her, he had gone underground years before with his father and mother.
Of this cake Arabella took some slices, wrapped them up in white
note-paper, and sent them to her companions in the pork-dressing
business, Anny and Sarah, labelling each packet “_In remembrance of
good advice_.”
The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not very
brilliant even to the most sanguine mind. He, a stone-mason’s
apprentice, nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till he
should be out of his time. His wife was absolutely useless in a
town-lodging, where he at first had considered it would be necessary
for them to live. But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so
little a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between
the Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a
vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep
a pig. But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it was
a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. Arabella, however,
felt that all these make-shifts were temporary; she had gained a
husband; that was the thing—a husband with a lot of earning power in
him for buying her frocks and hats when he should begin to get
frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw aside those stupid
books for practical undertakings.
So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage, giving up
his old room at his aunt’s—where so much of the hard labour at Greek
and Latin had been carried on.
A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long tail of
hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back of
her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon the
looking-glass which he had bought her.
“What—it wasn’t your own?” he said, with a sudden distaste for her.
“Oh no—it never is nowadays with the better class.”
“Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed to
be different. Besides, you’ve enough of your own, surely?”
“Yes, enough as country notions go. But in town the men expect more,
and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—”
“Barmaid at Aldbrickham?”
“Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house
there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to
getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have the
better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town than all your
Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair—the barber’s
assistant told me so.”
Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be true
to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would
and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their
simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct
towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in
counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was
no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no
more of it.
A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few weeks,
even though the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy.
There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her
acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts,
and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.
Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one
market-day with this quality in her carriage when she met Anny her
former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.
As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them
without saying it.
“So it turned out a good plan, you see!” remarked the girl to the wife.
“I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear good fellow, and you
ought to be proud of un.”
“I am,” said Mrs. Fawley quietly.
“And when do you expect?”
“Ssh! Not at all.”
“What!”
“I was mistaken.”
“Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that’s
clever—it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o’,
wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the real
thing—not that one could sham it!”
“Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I didn’t know.”
“My word—won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’ Saturday
nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick—a double one, by the
Lord!”
“I’ll own to the first, but not to the second… Pooh—he won’t care!
He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down, bless
’ee—men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is married.”
Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached
the time when in the natural course of things she would have to reveal
that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. The occasion
was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their chamber in the
lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his work
every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve hours, and had retired
to rest before his wife. When she came into the room he was between
sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her undressing before
the little looking-glass as he lay.
One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her face
being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she was
amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the dimple
before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was mistress,
effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for the first
time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face during his
intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the earlier weeks
of their acquaintance.
“Don’t do that, Arabella!” he said suddenly. “There is no harm in it,
but—I don’t like to see you.”
She turned and laughed. “Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!” she said.
“How countrified you are! That’s nothing.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I
was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was fatter then.”
“I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a
woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you.”
“Most men think otherwise.”
“I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?”
“I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.”
“Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the
adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening.
I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father’s
house.”
“You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more
finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. There was
not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away
for three months.”
“You’ll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won’t you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, of course—little things to make.”
“Oh.”
“When will it be? Can’t you tell me exactly, instead of in such general
terms as you have used?”
“Tell you?”
“Yes—the date.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I made a mistake.”
“What?”
“It was a mistake.”
He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. “How can that be?”
“Women fancy wrong things sometimes.”
“But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of
furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn’t have hurried on our
affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if
it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to
save you, ready or no… Good God!”
“Don’t take on, dear. What’s done can’t be undone.”
“I have no more to say!”
He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between
them.
When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a
different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to accept
her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while
ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes
involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man’s one
opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of
contributing his units of work to the general progress of his
generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory
instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be
only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he
had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught
in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a
lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the
immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But the
marriage remained.
X
The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had
fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering was
timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so that
Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a
day.
The night had seemed strangely silent. Jude looked out of the window
long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with
snow—snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still
falling.
“I’m afraid the pig-killer won’t be able to come,” he said to Arabella.
“Oh, he’ll come. You must get up and make the water hot, if you want
Challow to scald him. Though I like singeing best.”
“I’ll get up,” said Jude. “I like the way of my own county.”
He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding it
with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze flinging a
cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of cheerfulness
was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze—to heat water to
scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as yet lived, and
whose voice could be continually heard from a corner of the garden. At
half-past six, the time of appointment with the butcher, the water
boiled, and Jude’s wife came downstairs.