Jude the Obscure
took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you know,
Caroline” (turning to the left). “It would ha’ been a blessing if
Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless
boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be
done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can.
Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. It keeps him out
of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?” she continued, as the boy,
feeling the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved
aside.
The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of
Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indifferently) to have him
with her—“to kip ’ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the
winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.”
Miss Fawley doubted it. … “Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to take
’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,” she continued,
in frowning pleasantry. “I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one.
The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather.
His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not seen the
child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four
walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were
married, didn’ get a house of their own for some year or more; and then
they only had one till—Well, I won’t go into that. Jude, my child,
don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any
more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till
the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!”
Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went
out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast.
The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging from the garden
by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a path northward, till
he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of the
upland, which was sown as a corn-field. This vast concave was the scene
of his labours for Mr. Troutham the farmer, and he descended into the
midst of it.
The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round,
where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge
and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the
scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the
arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the
fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though
once by many of his own dead family.
“How ugly it is here!” he murmured.
The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a
piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse,
taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that
of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really
attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient
harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of
ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play,
bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on
every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet
had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge
which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given
themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by
the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made
love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next
seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this
neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a
lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a
work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good to feed in.
The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds
used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off
pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished
like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him
warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.
He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew
sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like
himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he
frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of gentle
friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in the
least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that
she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.
“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You _shall_ have some
dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can
afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make
a good meal!”
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed
their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life
with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled
his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean
and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself as
their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his
buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised
senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence used. The
birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the
latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red
face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the clacker swinging in
his hand.
“So it’s ‘Eat my dear birdies,’ is it, young man? ‘Eat, dear birdies,’
indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, ‘Eat, dear
birdies,’ again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the
schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye, hey? That’s how
you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!”
Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham
had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame
round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts with the
flat side of Jude’s own rattle, till the field echoed with the blows,
which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.
“Don’t ’ee, sir—please don’t ’ee!” cried the whirling child, as
helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked fish
swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the
path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circular
race. “I—I sir—only meant that—there was a good crop in the ground—I
saw ’em sow it—and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner—and you
wouldn’t miss it, sir—and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to
’em—oh, oh, oh!”
This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more
than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still
smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing to
resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant
workers—who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of
clacking with great assiduity—and echoing from the brand-new church
tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the
farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man.
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the
quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it
him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and never let
him see him in one of those fields again.
Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway
weeping—not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the
perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was
good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful
sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in
the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.
With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the
village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge
and across a pasture. Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms lying
half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as they always did
in such weather at that time of the year. It was impossible to advance
in regular steps without crushing some of them at each tread.
Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not
himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of
young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and
often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next
morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a
fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the
tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy.
This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was
the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the
curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with
him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the earthworms,
without killing a single one.
On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a
little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, “Well, how do you
come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?”
“I’m turned away.”
“What?”
“Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few
peckings of corn. And there’s my wages—the last I shall ever hae!”
He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.
“Ah!” said his aunt, suspending her breath. And she opened upon him a
lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands
doing nothing. “If you can’t skeer birds, what can ye do? There! don’t
ye look so deedy! Farmer Troutham is not so much better than myself,
come to that. But ’tis as Job said, ‘Now they that are younger than I
have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set
with the dogs of my flock.’ His father was my father’s journeyman,
anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let ’ee go to work for ’n, which
I shouldn’t ha’ done but to keep ’ee out of mischty.”
More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for
dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,
and only secondarily from a moral one.
“Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham
planted. Of course you was wrong in that. Jude, Jude, why didstn’t go
off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere? But,
oh no—poor or’nary child—there never was any sprawl on thy side of the
family, and never will be!”
“Where is this beautiful city, Aunt—this place where Mr. Phillotson is
gone to?” asked the boy, after meditating in silence.
“Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is. Near a
score of miles from here. It is a place much too good for you ever to
have much to do with, poor boy, I’m a-thinking.”
“And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?”
“How can I tell?”
“Could I go to see him?”
“Lord, no! You didn’t grow up hereabout, or you wouldn’t ask such as
that. We’ve never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor
folk in Christminster with we.”
Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an
undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the
pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more translucent, and the
position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat
over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at