Jude the Obscure
branch of the family; and on further questioning the old woman had
replied that the girl lived in Christminster, though she did not know
where, or what she was doing.
His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him; and
ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of
following 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 and dun-roofed,
it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost with the tip of
one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of the crinkled line
along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fields of that ancient
kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset, a vane here and
there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle to a picture of
sober secondary and tertiary hues.
Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollard
willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted the
outmost lamps of the town—some of those lamps which had sent into the
sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his days of
dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him
dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these years
in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him now.
He was a species of Dick Whittington whose spirit was touched to finer
issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlying streets
with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing of the real city
in the suburbs on this side. His first want being a lodging he
scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offer on 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 he opened
under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it,
but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to
reach the heart of the place.
After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediæval pile that
he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the gateway.
He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners which no
lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; and a little
further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it were with
the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he passed objects
out of harmony with its general expression he allowed his eyes to slip
over them as if he did not see them.
A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes
had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant for
a hundred.
When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the
quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with his
fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes
passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined
among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through ten
bygone years, and what mattered a night’s rest for once? High against
the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed pinnacles and
indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now
by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten,
there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched
and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by
the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought
could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.
Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the
isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation
being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.
He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost,
gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with which the nooks
were haunted.
During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife and
furniture’s uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read and
learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his position,
of the worthies who had spent their youth within these reverend walls,
and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of them, by
the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his fancy
disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The brushings of
the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs were as the
passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf
on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their mournful souls, the
shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement, making him comrades
in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he ran against them without
feeling their bodily frames.
The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he could
not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the
friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed
into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us.
Speculative philosophers drew along, not always with wrinkled foreheads
and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but pink-faced, slim, and active
as in youth; modern divines sheeted in their surplices, among whom the
most real to Jude Fawley were the founders of the religious school
called Tractarian; the well-known three, the enthusiast, the poet, and
the formularist, the echoes of whose teachings had influenced him even
in his obscure home. A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move
them at sight of those other sons of the place, the form in the
full-bottomed wig, statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly
shaven historian so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of
the same incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the
faithful, and took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.
He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer
movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;
the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose
mind contracted with the same.
The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in an odd
impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained foreheads,
and weak-eyed as bats with constant research; then official
characters—such men as governor-generals and lord-lieutenants, in whom
he took little interest; chief-justices and lord chancellors, silent
thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely the names. A keener regard
attached to the prelates, by reason of his own former hopes. Of them he
had an ample band—some men of heart, others rather men of head; he who
apologized for the Church in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening
Hymn; and near them the great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and
zealot, shadowed like Jude by his matrimonial difficulties.
Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them
as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience
on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a
start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the wanderer
were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over his lamp;
and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it was, and
what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went,
he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception of a belated
townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be catching 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 the latter
observing him.
Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men
and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he had
brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As he drew
towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had just been
conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances; some audible,
some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (who afterwards mourned
Christminster as “the home of lost causes,” though Jude did not
remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:
“Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene! … Her ineffable charm
keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to
perfection.”
Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had
just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul
might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:
“Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a
country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the
ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to
now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from
whatever quarter it may come… Deprive me of office to-morrow, you can
never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the powers
committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no desire
to gratify ambition, for no personal gain.”
Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: “How shall
we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world, to
those evidences [miracles] which were presented by Omnipotence? … The
sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and
appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral 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 of
the _Apologia_:
“My argument was … that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural
theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging
probabilities … that probabilities which did not reach to 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 short
face, the genial Spectator:
“When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies in
me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire
goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my
heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents
themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must
quickly follow.”
And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar
rhyme, 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 he had
overslept himself and then said:
“By Jove—I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she’s
here all the time! … and my old schoolmaster, too.” His words about his
schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words concerning
his cousin.
II
Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean
bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and