Jude the Obscure Read online

  II

  Necessary meditations on the actual, including the meanbread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, andcompelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs. Hehad to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemedby many of its professors to be work at all.

  Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that thecolleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults aboveground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. Thespirits of the great men had disappeared.

  The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally,less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan andcomrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actuallyexecuted those forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them asone who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy inthe working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm,or convenient to the tool.

  What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more orless defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, beeninflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved himas he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They werewounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadlystruggle against years, weather, and man.

  The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he wasnot, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as hehad intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and themorning had nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to thinkthat in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one ofhis trade to do in the business of renovation. He asked his way tothe workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given him atAlfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers andchisels.

  The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edgesand smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he hadseen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas inmodern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when theywere new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical.How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

  He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing onthe bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were markedby precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude:there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.

  For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in thestone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by thename of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But helost it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employmentwhich might be offered him on the strength of his late employer'srecommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.

  Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching andimitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to sometemporary and local cause. He did not at that time see thatmediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that otherdevelopments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothicarchitecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosityof contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held inreverence was not yet revealed to him.

  Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thoughtagain of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed tofeel in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion. How he wished hehad that pretty portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt tosend it. She did so, with a request, however, that he was not tobring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or herrelations. Jude, a ridiculously affectionate fellow, promisednothing, put the photograph on the mantel-piece, kissed it--he didnot know why--and felt more at home. She seemed to look down andpreside over his tea. It was cheering--the one thing uniting him tothe emotions of the living city.

  There remained the schoolmaster--probably now a reverend parson.But he could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just yet;so raw and unpolished was his condition, so precarious were hisfortunes. Thus he still remained in loneliness. Although peoplemoved round him he virtually saw none. Not as yet having mingledwith the active life of the place it was largely non-existent to him.But the saints and prophets in the window-tracery, the paintingsin the galleries, the statues, the busts, the gargoyles, thecorbel-heads--these seemed to breathe his atmosphere. Like allnewcomers to a spot on which the past is deeply graven he heard thatpast announcing itself with an emphasis altogether unsuspected by,and even incredible to, the habitual residents.

  For many days he haunted the cloisters and quadrangles of thecolleges at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by impishechoes of his own footsteps, smart as the blows of a mallet. TheChristminster "sentiment," as it had been called, ate further andfurther into him; till he probably knew more about those buildingsmaterially, artistically, and historically, than any one of theirinmates.

  It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot ofhis enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object ofthat enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from thosehappy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mentallife; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read,mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall--but what a wall!

  Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he saw themgoing and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard theirvoices, marked their movements. The conversation of some of themore thoughtful among them seemed oftentimes, owing to his long andpersistent preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to hisown thoughts. Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at theantipodes. Of course he was. He was a young workman in a whiteblouse, and with stone-dust in the creases of his clothes; and inpassing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather sawthrough him as through a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.Whatever they were to him, he to them was not on the spot at all; andyet he had fancied he would be close to their lives by coming there.

  But the future lay ahead after all; and if he could only be sofortunate as to get into good employment he would put up with theinevitable. So he thanked God for his health and strength, and tookcourage. For the present he was outside the gates of everything,colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Thosepalaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on theworld through their panes.

  At length he did receive a message from the stone-mason's yard--thata job was waiting for him. It was his first encouragement, and heclosed with the offer promptly.

  He was young and strong, or he never could have executed with suchzest the undertakings to which he now applied himself, since theyinvolved reading most of the night after working all the day. Firsthe bought a shaded lamp for four and six-pence, and obtained a goodlight. Then he got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as hehad been unable to obtain elsewhere. Then, to the consternation ofhis landlady, he shifted all the furniture of his room--a single onefor living and sleeping--rigged up a curtain on a rope across themiddle, to make a double chamber out of one, hung up a thick blindthat nobody should know how he was curtailing the hours of sleep,laid out his books, and sat down.

  Having been deeply encumbered by marrying, getting a cottage, andbuying the furniture which had disappeared in the wake of his wife,he had never been able to save any money since the time of thosedisastrous ventures, and till his wages began to come in he wasobliged to live in the narrowest way. After buying a book or twohe could not even afford himself a fire; and when the nights reekedwith the raw and cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp ina great-coat, hat, and woollen gloves.

  From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and theogee dome under which resounde
d the great bell of the city. The talltower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by thebridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase.These objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future wasdim.

  Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details ofprocedure. Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, henever dwelt upon them. For the present, he said to himself, the onething necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge,and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becominga son of the University. "For wisdom is a defence, and money is adefence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth lifeto them that have it." His desire absorbed him, and left no part ofhim to weigh its practicability.

  At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor oldaunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her--a fear thatJude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his cousinSue Bridehead and her relations. Sue's father, his aunt believed,had gone back to London, but the girl remained at Christminster. Tomake her still more objectionable, she was an artist or designer ofsome sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse, which wasa perfect seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no doubt abandoned tomummeries on that account--if not quite a Papist. (Miss DrusillaFawley was of her date, Evangelical.)

  As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, thisnews of Sue's probable opinions did not much influence him one way orthe other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly interesting.With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spareminutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt's description; andbeheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a desk, who wassuspiciously like the original of the portrait. He ventured to enteron a trivial errand, and having made his purchase lingered on thescene. The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women. It containedAnglican books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plasterangels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crossesthat were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals.He felt very shy of looking at the girl in the desk; she was sopretty that he could not believe it possible that she should belongto him. Then she spoke to one of the two older women behind thecounter; and he recognized in the accents certain qualities of hisown voice; softened and sweetened, but his own. What was she doing?He stole a glance round. Before her lay a piece of zinc, cut tothe shape of a scroll three or four feet long, and coated with adead-surface paint on one side. Hereon she was designing orilluminating, in characters of Church text, the single word

  A L L E L U J A

  "A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!" thought he.

  Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her skill inwork of this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father'soccupation as an ecclesiastical worker in metal. The lettering onwhich she was engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in somechancel to assist devotion.

  He came out. It would have been easy to speak to her there and then,but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to disregard herrequest so incontinently. She had used him roughly, but she hadbrought him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control himlent a pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative asan argument.

  So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet. He hadother reasons against doing so when he had walked away. She seemedso dainty beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dustytrousers that he felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as hehad felt about Mr. Phillotson. And how possible it was that she hadinherited the antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, asfar as a Christian could, particularly when he had told her thatunpleasant part of his history which had resulted in his becomingenchained to one of her own sex whom she would certainly not admire.

  Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there.The consciousness of her living presence stimulated him. But sheremained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he beganto weave curious and fantastic day-dreams.

  Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with somemore men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting ablock of worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, beforehoisting it to the parapet which they were repairing. Standing inposition the head man said, "Spaik when he heave! He-ho!" And theyheaved.

  All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow,pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing objectshould have been removed. She looked right into his face withliquid, untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him tocombine, keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, theirexpression, as well as that of her lips, taking its life from somewords just spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his facequite unconsciously. She no more observed his presence than that ofthe dust-motes which his manipulations raised into the sunbeams.

  His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turnedhis face away with a shy instinct to prevent her recognizing him,though as she had never once seen him she could not possibly do so;and might very well never have heard even his name. He couldperceive that though she was a country-girl at bottom, a lattergirlhood of some years in London, and a womanhood here, had takenall rawness out of her.

  When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her. He hadbeen so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of hergeneral mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a largefigure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant.That was about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her;all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter mightnot have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she wassurprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticitythat was his. How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate,almost accursed stock, have contrived to reach this pitch ofniceness? London had done it, he supposed.

  From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in hisbreast as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetizedlocality he dwelt in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on thishalf-visionary form; and he perceived that, whatever his obedientwish in a contrary direction, he would soon be unable to resist thedesire to make himself known to her.

  He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there werecrushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in anyother.

  The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong.The second was that they were cousins. It was not well for cousinsto fall in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion.The third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriageusually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation wouldduplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might beintensified to a tragic horror.

  Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only arelation's mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her ina practical way as some one to be proud of; to talk and nod to;later on, to be invited to tea by, the emotion spent on her beingrigorously that of a kinsman and well-wisher. So would she be to hima kindly star, an elevating power, a companion in Anglican worship,a tender friend.