Jude the Obscure

ecessary meditations on the actual, including the mean
bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and
compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs. He had
to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed by many
of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the colleges
had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances: some were
pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above ground;
something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The spirits 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 and comrade of
the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually executed those
forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them as one who knew their
beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the 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 or less
defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted
on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him as he would
have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded, broken,
sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against years,
weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was
not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he had
intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and the morning had
nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to think that in a place
of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of his trade to do in
the business of renovation. He asked his way to the workyard of the
stone-mason whose name had been given him at Alfredston; and soon heard
the familiar sound of the rubbers and chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and
smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen
abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern
prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of
those antiques might have been called prose when they were 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 on the
bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by
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 the
stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the
name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he lost
it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employment which
might be offered him on the strength of his late employer’s
recommendation; 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 and imitating
went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some temporary and local
cause. He did not at that time see that mediævalism was as dead as a
fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in
the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations
had no place. The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision
towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to
him.

Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thought
again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed to feel
in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion. How he wished he had that
pretty portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt to send it. She
did so, with a request, however, that he was not to bring disturbance
into the family by going to see the girl or her relations. Jude, a
ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised nothing, put the photograph
on the mantel-piece, kissed it—he did not know why—and felt more at
home. She seemed to look down and preside over his tea. It was
cheering—the one thing uniting him to the 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 his fortunes. Thus he
still remained in loneliness. Although people moved round him he
virtually saw none. Not as yet having mingled with the active life of
the place it was largely non-existent to him. But the saints and
prophets in the window-tracery, the paintings in the galleries, the
statues, the busts, the gargoyles, the corbel-heads—these seemed to
breathe his atmosphere. Like all newcomers to a spot on which the past
is deeply graven he heard that past 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 the colleges
at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by impish echoes of his own
footsteps, smart as the blows of a mallet. The Christminster
“sentiment,” as it had been called, ate further and further into him;
till he probably knew more about those buildings materially,
artistically, and historically, than any one of their inmates.

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his
enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of that
enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from those happy
young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life;
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 them
going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard their voices,
marked their movements. The conversation of some of the more thoughtful
among them seemed oftentimes, owing to his long and persistent
preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to his own thoughts.
Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at the antipodes. Of
course he was. He was a young workman in a white blouse, and with
stone-dust in the creases of his clothes; and in passing him they did
not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through 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; and yet 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 so
fortunate as to get into good employment he would put up with the
inevitable. So he thanked God for his health and strength, and took
courage. For the present he was outside the gates of everything,
colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Those palaces
of light and leading; he might some day look down on the world through
their panes.

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

He was young and strong, or he never could have executed with such zest
the undertakings to which he now applied himself, since they involved
reading most of the night after working all the day. First he bought a
shaded lamp for four and six-pence, and obtained a good light. Then he
got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as he had been unable
to obtain elsewhere. Then, to the consternation of his landlady, he
shifted all the furniture of his room—a single one for living and
sleeping—rigged up a curtain on a rope across the middle, to make a
double chamber out of one, hung up a thick blind that 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, and
buying the furniture which had disappeared in the wake of his wife, he
had never been able to save any money since the time of those
disastrous ventures, and till his wages began to come in he was obliged
to live in the narrowest way. After buying a book or two he could not
even afford himself a fire; and when the nights reeked with the raw and
cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp in a great-coat, hat,
and woollen gloves.

From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and the
ogee dome under which resounded the great bell of the city. The tall
tower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by the
bridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase. These
objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future was dim.

Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details of
procedure. Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, he
never dwelt upon them. For the present, he said to himself, the one
thing necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge,
and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becoming a
son of the University. “For wisdom is a defence, and money is a
defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to
them that have it.” His desire absorbed him, and left no part of him to
weigh its practicability.

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

As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, this
news of Sue’s probable opinions did not much influence him one way or
the other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly interesting.
With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spare
minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt’s description; and
beheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a desk, who was
suspiciously like the original of the portrait. He ventured to enter on
a trivial errand, and having made his purchase lingered on the scene.
The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women. It contained Anglican
books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster angels on
brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses that were
almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals. He felt very
shy of looking at the girl in the desk; she was so pretty that he could
not believe it possible that she should belong to him. Then she spoke
to one of the two older women behind the counter; and he recognized in
the accents certain qualities of his own voice; softened and sweetened,
but his own. What was she doing? He stole a glance round. Before her
lay a piece of zinc, cut to the shape of a scroll three or four feet
long, and coated with a dead-surface paint on one side. Hereon she was
designing or illuminating, 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 in work of
this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father’s occupation as
an ecclesiastical worker in metal. The lettering on which she was
engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in some chancel 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 her
request so incontinently. She had used him roughly, but she had brought
him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control him lent a
pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative as an
argument.

So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet. He had other
reasons against doing so when he had walked away. She seemed so dainty
beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty trousers that he
felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he had felt about Mr.
Phillotson. And how possible it was that she had inherited the
antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as far as a Christian
could, particularly when he had told her that unpleasant part of his
history which had resulted in his becoming enchained 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 she remained
more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave
curious and fantastic day-dreams.

Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with some more
men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting a block of
worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, before hoisting it
to the parapet which they were repairing. Standing in position the head
man said, “Spaik when he heave! He-ho!” And they heaved.

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 object
should have been removed. She looked right into his face with liquid,
untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to combine,
keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as
well as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just spoken
to a companion, and being carried on into his face quite unconsciously.
She no more observed his presence than that of the dust-motes which his
manipulations raised into the sunbeams.

His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turned his
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 could perceive that though
she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter girlhood of some years in
London, and a womanhood here, had taken all rawness out of her.

When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her. He had been
so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her general
mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure,
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 might not have
called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised
him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his.
How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock,
have contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done it, he
supposed.

From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in his breast
as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt
in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form;
and he perceived that, whatever his obedient wish in a contrary
direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to make himself
known to her.

He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there were
crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any
other.

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 cousins to fall
in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion. The
third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage
usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would
duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be
intensified to a tragic horror.

Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only a relation’s
mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her in a 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 being rigorously that of a kinsman
and well-wisher. So would she be to him a kindly star, an elevating
power, a companion in Anglican worship, a tender friend.