Jude the Obscure

Chapter 2

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 p*****t 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.