Jude the Obscure

Chapter 4

"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.