Jude the Obscure

T >> Thomas Hardy >> Jude the Obscure


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editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap.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 Saeculare," 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:


"Phoebe 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 mediaeval 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
mediaeval 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 Phoenix 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 L5000 a year, he would
give away L4500 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, Aeschylus, 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 manoeuvre 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:


HE KAINE DIATHEKE


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.


HE KAINE DIATHEKE 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.