Jude the Obscure

alking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration, the boy—an
ancient man in some phases of thought, much younger than his years in
others—was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom,
notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an
extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain that
danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner
swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots. Jude,
beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.

“Well, my man! I’m in a hurry, so you’ll have to walk pretty fast if
you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?”

“Ah—I’m known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public
benefactor.”

Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic
population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed, took
care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers formed his
only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His
position was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the
quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising. He was, in
fact, a survival. The distances he traversed on foot were enormous, and
extended nearly the whole length and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one
day seen him selling a pot of coloured lard to an old woman as a
certain cure for a bad leg, the woman arranging to pay a guinea, in
instalments of a shilling a fortnight, for the precious salve, which,
according to the physician, could only be obtained from a particular
animal which grazed on Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at
great risk to life and limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts
about this gentleman’s medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a
travelled personage, and one who might be a trustworthy source of
information on matters not strictly professional.

“I s’pose you’ve been to Christminster, Physician?”

“I have—many times,” replied the long thin man. “That’s one of my
centres.”

“It’s a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?”

“You’d say so, my boy, if you’d seen it. Why, the very sons of the old
women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin—not good
Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin—cat-Latin, as we used to
call it in my undergraduate days.”

“And Greek?”

“Well—that’s more for the men who are in training for bishops, that
they may be able to read the New Testament in the original.”

“I want to learn Latin and Greek myself.”

“A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue.”

“I mean to go to Christminster some day.”

“Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only proprietor
of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all disorders of the
alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness of breath. Two and
threepence a box—specially licensed by the government stamp.”

“Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?”

“I’ll sell you mine with pleasure—those I used as a student.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!” said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for the
amazing speed of the physician’s walk kept him in a dog-trot which was
giving him a stitch in the side.

“I think you’d better drop behind, my young man. Now I’ll tell you what
I’ll do. I’ll get you the grammars, and give you a first lesson, if
you’ll remember, at every house in the village, to recommend Physician
Vilbert’s golden ointment, life-drops, and female pills.”

“Where will you be with the grammars?”

“I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of
five-and-twenty minutes past seven. My movements are as truly timed as
those of the planets in their courses.”

“Here I’ll be to meet you,” said Jude.

“With orders for my medicines?”

“Yes, Physician.”

Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to recover breath, and
went home with a consciousness of having struck a blow for
Christminster.

Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly at
his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to
him—smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to
spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a
supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures, giving
rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.

He honestly performed his promise to the man of many cures, in whom he
now sincerely believed, walking miles hither and thither among the
surrounding hamlets as the Physician’s agent in advance. On the evening
appointed he stood motionless on the plateau, at the place where he had
parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach. The road-physician
was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of Jude on striking into
his pace, which the pedestrian did not diminish by a single unit of
force, the latter seemed hardly to recognize his young companion,
though with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings had grown light.
Jude thought it might perhaps be owing to his wearing another hat, and
he saluted the physician with dignity.

“Well, my boy?” said the latter abstractedly.

“I’ve come,” said Jude.

“You? who are you? Oh yes—to be sure! Got any orders, lad?”

“Yes.” And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers who
were willing to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and salve.
The quack mentally registered these with great care.

“And the Latin and Greek grammars?” Jude’s voice trembled with anxiety.

“What about them?”

“You were to bring me yours, that you used before you took your
degree.”

“Ah, yes, yes! Forgot all about it—all! So many lives depending on my
attention, you see, my man, that I can’t give so much thought as I
would like to other things.”

Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of the truth;
and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, “You haven’t brought ’em!”

“No. But you must get me some more orders from sick people, and I’ll
bring the grammars next time.”

Jude dropped behind. He was an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of
sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him all
at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of. There was to be no
intellectual light from this source. The leaves dropped from his
imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it, and
cried bitterly.

The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness. He might,
perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do that
required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and though
physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as to be
without a farthing of his own.

At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it gave Jude a
lead. Why should he not write to the schoolmaster, and ask him to be so
kind as to get him the grammars in Christminster? He might slip a
letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach
the desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand copies,
which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university
atmosphere?

To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it. It was
necessary to act alone.

After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the day
of the piano’s departure, which happened to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to
his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his
aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to
abandon his scheme.

The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling every
morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was stirring.
At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he saw from the
ends of it that it contained two thin books. He took it away into a
lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue
of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him,
by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech
into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a
pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere
known as Grimm’s Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal
completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language
were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given
language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being
furnished by the books aforesaid.

When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to the
Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.

The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wantonly
over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress,
and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day.
But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the first
time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had
supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not
recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be
individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an
hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and
watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of
the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion!
The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like
that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that
he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his
trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were
further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come,
because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic
error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.