Jude the Obscure

ude’s old and embittered aunt lay unwell at Marygreen, and on the
following Sunday he went to see her—a visit which was the result of a
victorious struggle against his inclination to turn aside to the
village of Lumsdon and obtain a miserable interview with his cousin, in
which the word nearest his heart could not be spoken, and the sight
which had tortured him could not be revealed.

His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great part of Jude’s
short day was occupied in making arrangements for her comfort. The
little bakery business had been sold to a neighbour, and with the
proceeds of this and her savings she was comfortably supplied with
necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living with her and
ministering to her wants. It was not till the time had nearly come for
him to leave that he obtained a quiet talk with her, and his words
tended insensibly towards his cousin.

“Was Sue born here?”

“She was—in this room. They were living here at that time. What made
’ee ask that?”

“Oh—I wanted to know.”

“Now you’ve been seeing her!” said the harsh old woman. “And what did I
tell ’ee?”

“Well—that I was not to see her.”

“Have you gossiped with her?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t keep it up. She was brought up by her father to hate her
mother’s family; and she’ll look with no favour upon a working chap
like you—a townish girl as she’s become by now. I never cared much
about her. A pert little thing, that’s what she was too often, with her
tight-strained nerves. Many’s the time I’ve smacked her for her
impertinence. Why, one day when she was walking into the pond with her
shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats pulled above her knees,
afore I could cry out for shame, she said: ‘Move on, Aunty! This is no
sight for modest eyes!’”

“She was a little child then.”

“She was twelve if a day.”

“Well—of course. But now she’s older she’s of a thoughtful, quivering,
tender nature, and as sensitive as—”

“Jude!” cried his aunt, springing up in bed. “Don’t you be a fool about
her!”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a thing as a man
could possibly do for himself by trying hard. But she’s gone to the
other side of the world, and med never trouble you again. And there’ll
be a worse thing if you, tied and bound as you be, should have a fancy
for Sue. If your cousin is civil to you, take her civility for what it
is worth. But anything more than a relation’s good wishes it is stark
madness for ’ee to give her. If she’s townish and wanton it med bring
’ee to ruin.”

“Don’t say anything against her, Aunt! Don’t, please!”

A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the companion and nurse of
his aunt, who must have been listening to the conversation, for she
began a commentary on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as a
character in her recollections. She described what an odd little maid
Sue had been when a pupil at the village school across the green
opposite, before her father went to London—how, when the vicar arranged
readings and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the smallest of
them all, “in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink sash”; how
she recited “Excelsior,” “There was a sound of revelry by night,” and
“The Raven”; how during the delivery she would knit her little brows
and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as if some real
creature stood there—

“Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,
wandering from the Nightly shore,
Tell me what thy lordly name is
on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“She’d bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear,” corroborated the
sick woman reluctantly, “as she stood there in her little sash and
things, that you could see un a’most before your very eyes. You too,
Jude, had the same trick as a child of seeming to see things in the
air.”

The neighbour told also of Sue’s accomplishments in other kinds:

“She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could do things that
only boys do, as a rule. I’ve seen her hit in and steer down the long
slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing, one of a file of
twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted on glass, and
up the back slide without stopping. All boys except herself; and then
they’d cheer her, and then she’d say, ‘Don’t be saucy, boys,’ and
suddenly run indoors. They’d try to coax her out again. But ’a wouldn’t
come.”

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable
that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt that
day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the school to
see the room in which Sue’s little figure had so glorified itself; but
he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his
residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes. Jude was
startled by a salute from one of them:

“Ye’ve got there right enough, then!”

Jude showed that he did not understand.

“Why, to the seat of l’arning—the ‘City of Light’ you used to talk to
us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?”

“Yes; more!” cried Jude.

“When I was there once for an hour I didn’t see much in it for my part;
auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not much
going on at that.”

“You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a
man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought and
religion—the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country. All
that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of infinite
motion—the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a
well-known writer.”

“Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn’t see
nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot
o’ beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha’porth o’ cheese, and waited till it
was time to come along home. You’ve j’ined a college by this time, I
suppose?”

“Ah, no!” said Jude. “I am almost as far off that as ever.”

“How so?”

Jude slapped his pocket.

“Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you—only for them
with plenty o’ money.”

“There you are wrong,” said Jude, with some bitterness. “They are for
such ones!”

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude’s attention from the
imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract figure,
more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation of the
arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure to a seat
in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his prospects in a
cold northern light. He had lately felt that he could not quite satisfy
himself in his Greek—in the Greek of the dramatists particularly. So
fatigued was he sometimes after his day’s work that he could not
maintain the critical attention necessary for thorough application. He
felt that he wanted a coach—a friend at his elbow to tell him in a
moment what sometimes would occupy him a weary month in extracting from
unanticipative, clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely than
he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using up his
spare hours in a vague labour called “private study” without giving an
outlook on practicabilities?

“I ought to have thought of this before,” he said, as he journeyed
back. “It would have been better never to have embarked in the scheme
at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or what I
am aiming at… This hovering outside the walls of the colleges, as if
expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to lift me inside,
won’t do! I must get special information.”

The next week accordingly he sought it. What at first seemed an
opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentleman,
who had been pointed out as the head of a particular college, walking
in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at which Jude
chanced to be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and Jude looked
anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet rather
reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not go up and
address him; but he was sufficiently influenced by the incident to
think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his difficulties
by letter to some of the best and most judicious of these old masters,
and obtain their advice.

During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in such
positions about the city as would afford him glimpses of several of the
most distinguished among the provosts, wardens, and other heads of
houses; and from those he ultimately selected five whose physiognomies
seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and far-seeing men. To
these five he addressed letters, briefly stating his difficulties, and
asking their opinion on his stranded situation.

When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize them; he
wished they had not been sent. “It is just one of those intrusive,
vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in these days,” he
thought. “Why couldn’t I know better than address utter strangers in
such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man with a bad
character, for all that they know to the contrary… Perhaps that’s what
I am!”

Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply as to
his one last chance of redemption. He waited day after day, saying that
it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting. While he waited he
was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson. Phillotson was giving up
the school near Christminster, for a larger one further south, in
Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would affect his cousin; whether,
as seemed possible, it was a practical move of the schoolmaster’s
towards a larger income, in view of a provision for two instead of one,
he would not allow himself to say. And the tender relations between
Phillotson and the young girl of whom Jude was passionately enamoured
effectually made it repugnant to Jude’s tastes to apply to Phillotson
for advice on his own scheme.

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written vouchsafed
no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back entirely on himself,
as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened hope. By indirect
inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had long uneasily
suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open scholarships and
exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to do this a good deal
of coaching would be necessary, and much natural ability. It was next
to impossible that a man reading on his own system, however widely and
thoroughly, even over the prolonged period of ten years, should be able
to compete with those who had passed their lives under trained teachers
and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the
only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of a
material kind. With the help of his information he began to reckon the
extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay, that,
at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be able to
save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a position
to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance to a
matriculation examination. The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the
place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move
among the churches and halls and become imbued with the genius loci,
had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its charms to him
from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal thing to do. “Let
me only get there,” he had said with the fatuousness of Crusoe over his
big boat, “and the rest is but a matter of time and energy.” It would
have been far better for him in every way if he had never come within
sight and sound of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy
commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and
thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear
to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an
iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He
looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his
thought was akin to Heine’s:

Above the youth’s inspired and flashing eyes
I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into
his dear Sue’s life by involving her in this collapse. And the painful
details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should now be
spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known a little
part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged thus
unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he awoke
from his dream. Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he went up
to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built theatre
that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had windows all
round, from which an outlook over the whole town and its edifices could
be gained. Jude’s eyes swept all the views in succession, meditatively,
mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings and their associations and
privileges were not for him. From the looming roof of the great
library, into which he hardly ever had time to enter, his gaze
travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables, streets, chapels,
gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble of this unrivalled
panorama. He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among the
manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied,
unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and
panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read
nor the high thinkers live.

He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees which
screened her whose presence had at first been the support of his heart,
and whose loss was now a maddening torture. But for this blow he might
have borne with his fate. With Sue as companion he could have renounced
his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the
reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should
affect him disastrously. Phillotson had no doubt passed through a
similar intellectual disappointment to that which now enveloped him.
But the schoolmaster had been since blest with the consolation of sweet
Sue, while for him there was no consoler.

Descending to the streets, he went listlessly along till he arrived at
an inn, and entered it. Here he drank several glasses of beer in rapid
succession, and when he came out it was night. By the light of the
flickering lamps he rambled home to supper, and had not long been
sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just
arrived for him. She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of its
possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that it bore
the embossed stamp of one of the colleges whose heads he had addressed.
“One—at last!” cried Jude.

The communication was brief, and not exactly what he had expected;
though it really was from the master in person. It ran thus:

BIBLIOLL COLLEGE.

SIR,—I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your
description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you
will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your
own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other
course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully,

T. TETUPHENAY.

To Mr. J. FAWLEY, Stone-mason.

This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude. He had known all that
before. He knew it was true. Yet it seemed a hard slap after ten years
of labour, and its effect upon him just now was to make him rise
recklessly from the table, and, instead of reading as usual, to go
downstairs and into the street. He stood at a bar and tossed off two or
three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he came to a
spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city, gazing abstractedly
at the groups of people like one in a trance, till, coming to himself,
he began talking to the policeman fixed there.

That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself an inch
and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking humorously at
Jude, said, “You’ve had a wet, young man.”

“No; I’ve only begun,” he replied cynically.

Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough. He only heard in part
the policeman’s further remarks, having fallen into thought on what
struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway, whom nobody
ever thought of now. It had more history than the oldest college in the
city. It was literally teeming, stratified, with the shades of human
groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce; real enactments
of the intensest kind. At Fourways men had stood and talked of
Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution of King Charles, the
burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the Norman Conquest, possibly of
the arrival of Caesar. Here the two sexes had met for loving, hating,
coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered, for each other; had
triumphed over each other; cursed each other in jealousy, blessed each
other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely
more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life. These
struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster,
though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the
humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers,
who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at
all.

He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he went on till
he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.
Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,
soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light
women of the more respectable and amateur class. He had tapped the real
Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked about and
jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon a platform
and sang a comic song.

The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting
and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances—wistful to
gain a little joy. At ten o’clock he came away, choosing a circuitous
route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head had just
sent him the note.

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the
lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote
along the wall:

“I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea,
who knoweth not such things as these?”—Job xii. 3.