Jude the Obscure

T >> Thomas Hardy >> Jude the Obscure


"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.