Jude the Obscure
he should have suggested to her to meet him out of doors, when he might
have said he would call upon her. It was, in fact, the country custom
to meet thus, and nothing else had occurred to him. Arabella had been
met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might not seem respectable
to a dear girl like Sue. However, it could not be helped now, and he
moved towards the point a few minutes before the hour, under the
glimmer of the newly lighted lamps.
The broad street was silent, and almost deserted, although it was not
late. He saw a figure on the other side, which turned out to be hers,
and they both converged towards the crossmark at the same moment.
Before either had reached it she called out to him:
“I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in my life!
Come further on.”
The voice, though positive and silvery, had been tremulous. They walked
on in parallel lines, and, waiting her pleasure, Jude watched till she
showed signs of closing in, when he did likewise, the place being where
the carriers’ carts stood in the daytime, though there was none on the
spot then.
“I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn’t call,” began Jude
with the bashfulness of a lover. “But I thought it would save time if
we were going to walk.”
“Oh—I don’t mind that,” she said with the freedom of a friend. “I have
really no place to ask anybody in to. What I meant was that the place
you chose was so horrid—I suppose I ought not to say horrid—I mean
gloomy and inauspicious in its associations… But isn’t it funny to
begin like this, when I don’t know you yet?” She looked him up and down
curiously, though Jude did not look much at her.
“You seem to know me more than I know you,” she added.
“Yes—I have seen you now and then.”
“And you knew who I was, and didn’t speak? And now I am going away!”
“Yes. That’s unfortunate. I have hardly any other friend. I have,
indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I don’t quite like to
call on him just yet. I wonder if you know anything of him—Mr.
Phillotson? A parson somewhere about the county I think he is.”
“No—I only know of one Mr. Phillotson. He lives a little way out in the
country, at Lumsdon. He’s a village schoolmaster.”
“Ah! I wonder if he’s the same. Surely it is impossible! Only a
schoolmaster still! Do you know his Christian name—is it Richard?”
“Yes—it is; I’ve directed books to him, though I’ve never seen him.”
“Then he couldn’t do it!”
Jude’s countenance fell, for how could he succeed in an enterprise
wherein the great Phillotson had failed? He would have had a day of
despair if the news had not arrived during his sweet Sue’s presence,
but even at this moment he had visions of how Phillotson’s failure in
the grand university scheme would depress him when she had gone.
“As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call upon him?” said
Jude suddenly. “It is not late.”
She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through some prettily
wooded country. Presently the embattled tower and square turret of the
church rose into the sky, and then the school-house. They inquired of a
person in the street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to be at home, and
were informed that he was always at home. A knock brought him to the
school-house door, with a candle in his hand and a look of inquiry on
his face, which had grown thin and careworn since Jude last set eyes on
him.
That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should be of
this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which had
surrounded the school-master’s figure in Jude’s imagination ever since
their parting. It created in him at the same time a sympathy with
Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man. Jude
told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an old friend who
had been kind to him in his youthful days.
“I don’t remember you in the least,” said the school-master
thoughtfully. “You were one of my pupils, you say? Yes, no doubt; but
they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have
naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the quite
recent ones.”
“It was out at Marygreen,” said Jude, wishing he had not come.
“Yes. I was there a short time. And is this an old pupil, too?”
“No—that’s my cousin… I wrote to you for some grammars, if you
recollect, and you sent them?”
“Ah—yes!—I do dimly recall that incident.”
“It was very kind of you to do it. And it was you who first started me
on that course. On the morning you left Marygreen, when your goods were
on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your scheme was to be a
university man and enter the Church—that a degree was the necessary
hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a theologian or teacher.”
“I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not keep
my own counsel. The idea was given up years ago.”
“I have never forgotten it. It was that which brought me to this part
of the country, and out here to see you to-night.”
“Come in,” said Phillotson. “And your cousin, too.”
They entered the parlour of the school-house, where there was a lamp
with a paper shade, which threw the light down on three or four books.
Phillotson took it off, so that they could see each other better, and
the rays fell on the nervous little face and vivacious dark eyes and
hair of Sue, on the earnest features of her cousin, and on the
schoolmaster’s own maturer face and figure, showing him to be a spare
and thoughtful personage of five-and-forty, with a thin-lipped,
somewhat refined mouth, a slightly stooping habit, and a black frock
coat, which from continued frictions shone a little at the
shoulder-blades, the middle of the back, and the elbows.
The old friendship was imperceptibly renewed, the schoolmaster speaking
of his experiences, and the cousins of theirs. He told them that he
still thought of the Church sometimes, and that though he could not
enter it as he had intended to do in former years he might enter it as
a licentiate. Meanwhile, he said, he was comfortable in his present
position, though he was in want of a pupil-teacher.
They did not stay to supper, Sue having to be indoors before it grew
late, and the road was retraced to Christminster. Though they had
talked of nothing more than general subjects, Jude was surprised to
find what a revelation of woman his cousin was to him. She was so
vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling.
An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could
hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points was such
that it might have been misread as vanity. It was with heart-sickness
he perceived that, while her sentiments towards him were those of the
frankest friendliness only, he loved her more than before becoming
acquainted with her; and the gloom of the walk home lay not in the
night overhead, but in the thought of her departure.
“Why must you leave Christminster?” he said regretfully. “How can you
do otherwise than cling to a city in whose history such men as Newman,
Pusey, Ward, Keble, loom so large!”
“Yes—they do. Though how large do they loom in the history of the
world? … What a funny reason for caring to stay! I should never have
thought of it!” She laughed.
“Well—I must go,” she continued. “Miss Fontover, one of the partners
whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with her; and it is best to
go.”
“How did that happen?”
“She broke some statuary of mine.”
“Oh? Wilfully?”
“Yes. She found it in my room, and though it was my property she threw
it on the floor and stamped on it, because it was not according to her
taste, and ground the arms and the head of one of the figures all to
bits with her heel—a horrid thing!”
“Too Catholic-Apostolic for her, I suppose? No doubt she called them
popish images and talked of the invocation of saints.”
“No… No, she didn’t do that. She saw the matter quite differently.”
“Ah! Then I am surprised!”
“Yes. It was for quite some other reason that she didn’t like my
patron-saints. So I was led to retort upon her; and the end of it was
that I resolved not to stay, but to get into an occupation in which I
shall be more independent.”
“Why don’t you try teaching again? You once did, I heard.”
“I never thought of resuming it; for I was getting on as an
art-designer.”
“_Do_ let me ask Mr. Phillotson to let you try your hand in his school?
If you like it, and go to a training college, and become a first-class
certificated mistress, you get twice as large an income as any designer
or church artist, and twice as much freedom.”
“Well—ask him. Now I must go in. Good-bye, dear Jude! I am so glad we
have met at last. We needn’t quarrel because our parents did, need we?”
Jude did not like to let her see quite how much he agreed with her, and
went his way to the remote street in which he had his lodging.
To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which operated without
regard of consequences, and the next evening he again set out for
Lumsdon, fearing to trust to the persuasive effects of a note only. The
school-master was unprepared for such a proposal.
“What I rather wanted was a second year’s transfer, as it is called,”
he said. “Of course your cousin would do, personally; but she has had
no experience. Oh—she has, has she? Does she really think of adopting
teaching as a profession?”
Jude said she was disposed to do so, he thought, and his ingenious
arguments on her natural fitness for assisting Mr. Phillotson, of which
Jude knew nothing whatever, so influenced the schoolmaster that he said
he would engage her, assuring Jude as a friend that unless his cousin
really meant to follow on in the same course, and regarded this step as
the first stage of an apprenticeship, of which her training in a normal
school would be the second stage, her time would be wasted quite, the
salary being merely nominal.
The day after this visit Phillotson received a letter from Jude,
containing the information that he had again consulted his cousin, who
took more and more warmly to the idea of tuition; and that she had
agreed to come. It did not occur for a moment to the schoolmaster and
recluse that Jude’s ardour in promoting the arrangement arose from any
other feelings towards Sue than the instinct of co-operation common
among members of the same family.
V
The schoolmaster sat in his homely dwelling attached to the school,
both being modern erections; and he looked across the way at the old
house in which his teacher Sue had a lodging. The arrangement had been
concluded very quickly. A pupil-teacher who was to have been
transferred to Mr. Phillotson’s school had failed him, and Sue had been
taken as stop-gap. All such provisional arrangements as these could
only last till the next annual visit of H.M. Inspector, whose approval
was necessary to make them permanent. Having taught for some two years
in London, though she had abandoned that vocation of late, Miss
Bridehead was not exactly a novice, and Phillotson thought there would
be no difficulty in retaining her services, which he already wished to
do, though she had only been with him three or four weeks. He had found
her quite as bright as Jude had described her; and what
master-tradesman does not wish to keep an apprentice who saves him half
his labour?
It was a little over half-past eight o’clock in the morning and he was
waiting to see her cross the road to the school, when he would follow.
At twenty minutes to nine she did cross, a light hat tossed on her
head; and he watched her as a curiosity. A new emanation, which had
nothing to do with her skill as a teacher, seemed to surround her this
morning. He went to the school also, and Sue remained governing her