Jude the Obscure Read online

  Part Second

  AT CHRISTMINSTER

  "Save his own soul he hath no star."--SWINBURNE.

  "Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit; Tempore crevit amor."--OVID.

  I

  The next noteworthy move in Jude's life was that in which he appearedgliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some threeyears' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella,and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her. He waswalking towards Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to thesouth-west of it.

  He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston: hewas out of his apprenticeship, and with his tools at his back seemedto be in the way of making a new start--the start to which, barringthe interruption involved in his intimacy and married experience withArabella, he had been looking forward for about ten years.

  Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible,meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance.He was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he worea closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth than is usualat his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was sometrouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust that settledon it in the pursuit of his trade. His capabilities in the latter,having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort,including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for therestoration of churches, and carving of a general kind. In Londonhe would probably have become specialized and have made himself a"moulding mason," a "foliage sculptor"--perhaps a "statuary."

  He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to the villagenearest the city in this direction, and was now walking the remainingfour miles rather from choice than from necessity, having alwaysfancied himself arriving thus.

  The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin--one morenearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual,as is often the case with young men. One day while in lodgings atAlfredston he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and hadobserved between the brass candlesticks on her mantlepiece thephotograph of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat with radiatingfolds under the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who shewas. His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his cousinSue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on furtherquestioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived inChristminster, though she did not know where, or what she was doing.

  His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him; andultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent offollowing his friend the school master thither.

  He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity,and obtained his first near view of the city. Grey-stoned anddun-roofed, it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almostwith the tip of one small toe within it, at the northernmost point ofthe crinkled line along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fieldsof that ancient kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset,a vane here and there on their many spires and domes giving sparkleto a picture of sober secondary and tertiary hues.

  Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollardwillows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted theoutmost lamps of the town--some of those lamps which had sent intothe sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his daysof dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at himdubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all theseyears in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want himnow.

  He was a species of Dick Whittington whose spirit was touched tofiner issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlyingstreets with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing ofthe real city in the suburbs on this side. His first want being alodging he scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offeron inexpensive terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded;and after inquiry took a room in a suburb nicknamed "Beersheba,"though he did not know this at the time. Here he installed himself,and having had some tea sallied forth.

  It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself heopened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled andfluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction heshould take to reach the heart of the place.

  After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediaeval pilethat he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by thegateway. He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark cornerswhich no lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; anda little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as itwere with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When hepassed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowedhis eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them.

  A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokeshad sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meantfor a hundred.

  When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into thequadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling withhis fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutespassed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentinedamong the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes throughten bygone years, and what mattered a night's rest for once? Highagainst the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketedpinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparentlynever trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemedto be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct airbeing accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemedimpossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepitand superseded chambers.

  Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed withthe isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, thesensation being that of one who walked but could not make himselfseen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thusalmost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostlypresences with which the nooks were haunted.

  During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wifeand furniture's uncompromising disappearance into space, he had readand learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in hisposition, of the worthies who had spent their youth within thesereverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturerage. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out inhis fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. Thebrushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambswere as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappingsof each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of theirmournful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement,making him comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if heran against them without feeling their bodily frames.

  The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things hecould not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late,from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who hasrecently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe whois still among us. Speculative philosophers drew along, not alwayswith wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, butpink-faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted intheir surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were thefounders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-knownthree, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoesof whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure home.A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move them at sight ofthose other sons of the place, the form in the full-bottomed wig,statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historianso ironically civil to Christianity; with others of the sameincredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the faithful, andtook equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.

  He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmermovement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;the man whose mind grew with his growth in y
ears, and the man whosemind contracted with the same.

  The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight inan odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strainedforeheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research;then official characters--such men as governor-generals andlord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices andlord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barelythe names. A keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason ofhis own former hopes. Of them he had an ample band--some men ofheart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the Churchin Latin; the saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them thegreat itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Judeby his matrimonial difficulties.

  Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations withthem as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes theaudience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceasedwith a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of thewanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker overhis lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice itwas, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solidflesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exceptionof a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to becatching a cold.

  A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice:

  "You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.What med you be up to?"

  It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without thelatter observing him.

  Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these menand their several messages to the world from a book or two that hehad brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As hedrew towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he hadjust been conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances;some audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (whoafterwards mourned Christminster as "the home of lost causes," thoughJude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:

  "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierceintellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charmkeeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, toperfection."

  Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he hadjust seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soulmight have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:

  "Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards acountry threatened with famine requires that that which has been theordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted tonow, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man fromwhatever quarter it may come... Deprive me of office to-morrow, youcan never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised thepowers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from nodesire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain."

  Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: "Howshall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophicworld, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented byOmnipotence? ... The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from theawful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in themoral or physical government of the world."

  Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

  How the world is made for each of us!

  * * * * *

  And each of the Many helps to recruit The life of the race by a general plan.

  Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author ofthe _Apologia_:

  "My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths ofnatural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring andconverging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reachto logical certainty might create a mental certitude."

  The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

  Why should we faint, and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

  He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the shortface, the genial Spectator:

  "When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy diesin me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinatedesire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon atombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs ofthe parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for thosewhom we must quickly follow."

  And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiarrhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

  Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die ...

  He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to have gone,and everything spoke of to-day. He started up in bed, thinking hehad overslept himself and then said:

  "By Jove--I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she'shere all the time! ... and my old schoolmaster, too." His wordsabout his schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his wordsconcerning his cousin.