Jude the Obscure

Chapter 6

His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great part of Jude's

short day was occupied in making arrangements for her comfort. The

little bakery business had been sold to a neighbour, and with the

proceeds of this and her savings she was comfortably supplied with

necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living with her and

ministering to her wants. It was not till the time had nearly come

for him to leave that he obtained a quiet talk with her, and his

words tended insensibly towards his cousin.

"Was Sue born here?"

"She was--in this room. They were living here at that time. What

made 'ee ask that?"

"Oh--I wanted to know."

"Now you've been seeing her!" said the harsh old woman. "And what

did I tell 'ee?"

"Well--that I was not to see her."

"Have you gossiped with her?"

"Yes."

"Then don't keep it up. She was brought up by her father to hate her

mother's family; and she'll look with no favour upon a working chap

like you--a townish girl as she's become by now. I never cared much

about her. A pert little thing, that's what she was too often, with

her tight-strained nerves. Many's the time I've smacked her for her

impertinence. Why, one day when she was walking into the pond with

her shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats pulled above her

knees, afore I could cry out for shame, she said: 'Move on, Aunty!

This is no sight for modest eyes!'"

"She was a little child then."

"She was twelve if a day."

"Well--of course. But now she's older she's of a thoughtful,

quivering, tender nature, and as sensitive as--"

"Jude!" cried his aunt, springing up in bed. "Don't you be a fool

about her!"

"No, no, of course not."

"Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a thing as a man

could possibly do for himself by trying hard. But she's gone to

the other side of the world, and med never trouble you again. And

there'll be a worse thing if you, tied and bound as you be, should

have a fancy for Sue. If your cousin is civil to you, take her

civility for what it is worth. But anything more than a relation's

good wishes it is stark madness for 'ee to give her. If she's

townish and wanton it med bring 'ee to ruin."

"Don't say anything against her, Aunt! Don't, please!"

A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the companion and nurse

of his aunt, who must have been listening to the conversation, for

she began a commentary on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as

a character in her recollections. She described what an odd little

maid Sue had been when a pupil at the village school across the green

opposite, before her father went to London--how, when the vicar

arranged readings and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the

smallest of them all, "in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink

sash"; how she recited "Excelsior," "There was a sound of revelry by

night," and "The Raven"; how during the delivery she would knit her

little brows and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as

if some real creature stood there--

"Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,

wandering from the Nightly shore,

Tell me what thy lordly name is

on the Night's Plutonian shore!"

"She'd bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear," corroborated the

sick woman reluctantly, "as she stood there in her little sash and

things, that you could see un a'most before your very eyes. You too,

Jude, had the same trick as a child of seeming to see things in the

air."

The neighbour told also of Sue's accomplishments in other kinds:

"She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could do things that

only boys do, as a rule. I've seen her hit in and steer down the

long slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing, one of

a file of twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted

on glass, and up the back slide without stopping. All boys except

herself; and then they'd cheer her, and then she'd say, 'Don't be

saucy, boys,' and suddenly run indoors. They'd try to coax her out

again. But 'a wouldn't come."

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable

that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt

that day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the

school to see the room in which Sue's little figure had so glorified

itself; but he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his

residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes. Jude

was startled by a salute from one of them:

"Ye've got there right enough, then!"

Jude showed that he did not understand.

"Why, to the seat of l'arning--the 'City of Light' you used to talk

to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?"

"Yes; more!" cried Jude.

"When I was there once for an hour I didn't see much in it for my

part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not

much going on at that."

"You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a

man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought

and religion--the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.

All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of

infinite motion--the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile

of a well-known writer."

"Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn't see

nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot

o' beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha'porth o' cheese, and waited till

it was time to come along home. You've j'ined a college by this

time, I suppose?"

"Ah, no!" said Jude. "I am almost as far off that as ever."

"How so?"

Jude slapped his pocket.

"Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you--only for

them with plenty o' money."

"There you are wrong," said Jude, with some bitterness. "They are

for such ones!"

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude's attention from

the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract

figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation

of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure

to a seat in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his

prospects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he

could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek--in the Greek of

the dramatists particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes after

his day's work that he could not maintain the critical attention

necessary for thorough application. He felt that he wanted a

coach--a friend at his elbow to tell him in a moment what sometimes

would occupy him a weary month in extracting from unanticipative,

clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely

than he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using

up his spare hours in a vague labour called "private study" without

giving an outlook on practicabilities?

"I ought to have thought of this before," he said, as he journeyed

back. "It would have been better never to have embarked in the

scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going,

or what I am aiming at... This hovering outside the walls of the

colleges, as if expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to

lift me inside, won't do! I must get special information."

The next week accordingly he sought it. What at first seemed an

opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentleman,

who had been pointed out as the head of a particular college, walking

in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at which

Jude chanced to be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and Jude

looked anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet

rather reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not

go up and address him; but he was sufficiently influenced by the

incident to think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his

difficulties by letter to some of the best and most judicious of

these old masters, and obtain their advice.

During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in such

positions about the city as would afford him glimpses of several

of the most distinguished among the provosts, wardens, and other

heads of houses; and from those he ultimately selected five whose

physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and

far-seeing men. To these five he addressed letters, briefly stating

his difficulties, and asking their opinion on his stranded situation.

When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize

them; he wished they had not been sent. "It is just one of those

intrusive, vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in these

days," he thought. "Why couldn't I know better than address utter

strangers in such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man

with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary...

Perhaps that's what I am!"

Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply

as to his one last chance of redemption. He waited day after day,

saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting.

While he waited he was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson.

Phillotson was giving up the school near Christminster, for a larger

one further south, in Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would

affect his cousin; whether, as seemed possible, it was a practical

move of the schoolmaster's towards a larger income, in view of a

provision for two instead of one, he would not allow himself to say.

And the tender relations between Phillotson and the young girl of

whom Jude was passionately enamoured effectually made it repugnant to

Jude's tastes to apply to Phillotson for advice on his own scheme.

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written

vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back

entirely on himself, as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened

hope. By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had

long uneasily suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open

scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to

do this a good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much natural

ability. It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own

system, however widely and thoroughly, even over the prolonged period

of ten years, should be able to compete with those who had passed

their lives under trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the

only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of

a material kind. With the help of his information he began to reckon

the extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay,

that, at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be

able to save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a

position to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance

to a matriculation examination. The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the

place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move

among the churches and halls and become imbued with the _genius

loci_, had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its

charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal

thing to do. "Let me only get there," he had said with the

fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, "and the rest is but a

matter of time and energy." It would have been far better for him in

every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive

precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object

of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true

perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that

the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under

the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the

vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine's:

Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes

I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into

his dear Sue's life by involving her in this collapse. And the

painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should

now be spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known

a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged

thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he

awoke from his dream. Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he

went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built

theatre that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had

windows all round, from which an outlook over the whole town and

its edifices could be gained. Jude's eyes swept all the views in

succession, meditatively, mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings

and their associations and privileges were not for him. From the

looming roof of the great library, into which he hardly ever had time

to enter, his gaze travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables,

streets, chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble

of this unrivalled panorama. He saw that his destiny lay not with

these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he

himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its

visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers

could not read nor the high thinkers live.

He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees which

screened her whose presence had at first been the support of his

heart, and whose loss was now a maddening torture. But for this blow

he might have borne with his fate. With Sue as companion he could

have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was

inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had

subjected himself should affect him disastrously. Phillotson had

no doubt passed through a similar intellectual disappointment to

that which now enveloped him. But the schoolmaster had been since

blest with the consolation of sweet Sue, while for him there was no

consoler.

Descending to the streets, he went listlessly along till he arrived

at an inn, and entered it. Here he drank several glasses of beer in

rapid succession, and when he came out it was night. By the light of

the flickering lamps he rambled home to supper, and had not long been

sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just

arrived for him. She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of

its possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that it

bore the embossed stamp of one of the colleges whose heads he had

addressed. "ONE--at last!" cried Jude.

The communication was brief, and not exactly what he had expected;

though it really was from the master in person. It ran thus:

BIBLIOLL COLLEGE.

SIR,--I have read your letter with interest; and, judging

from your description of yourself as a working-man, I

venture to think that you will have a much better chance

of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and

sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course.

That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours

faithfully,

T. TETUPHENAY.

To Mr. J. FAWLEY, Stone-mason.

This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had known all

that before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a hard slap after

ten years of labour, and its effect upon him just now was to make him

rise recklessly from the table, and, instead of reading as usual, to

go downstairs and into the street. He stood at a bar and tossed off

two or three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he

came to a spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city, gazing

abstractedly at the groups of people like one in a trance, till,

coming to himself, he began talking to the policeman fixed there.

That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself

an inch and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking

humorously at Jude, said, "You've had a wet, young man."

"No; I've only begun," he replied cynically.

Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He only heard in

part the policeman's further remarks, having fallen into thought on

what struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway, whom

nobody ever thought of now. It had more history than the oldest

college in the city. It was literally teeming, stratified, with the

shades of human groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce;

real enactments of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had stood

and talked of Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution of King

Charles, the burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the Norman

Conquest, possibly of the arrival of Caesar. Here the two sexes had

met for loving, hating, coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered,

for each other; had triumphed over each other; cursed each other in

jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely

more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life.

These struggling men and women before him were the reality of

Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster.

That was one of the humours of things. The floating population

of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not

Christminster in a local sense at all.

He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he went on till

he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.

Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,

soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light

women of the more respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the

real Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked

about and jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon

a platform and sang a comic song.

The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting

and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances--wistful

to gain a little joy. At ten o'clock he came away, choosing a

circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head

had just sent him the note.

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the

lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote

along the wall:

"_I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:

yea, who knoweth not such things as these?_"--Job xii. 3.