Jude the Obscure
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.
VII
The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning he laughed
at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a healthy one. He re-read
the letter from the master, and the wisdom in its lines, which had at
first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now. He saw himself as
a fool indeed.
Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not
proceed to his work. Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a
student, there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with
Sue. That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him through
his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till, unable to
bear it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the real
Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled
tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the
place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its
quaintness. Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced that he was
at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to expect
anything.
In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one, Jude
still retaining his seat in the corner, though his money was all spent,
and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit. He
surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity and
philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly, and made
friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed
church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in
earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed
auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and
Uncle Joe. There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and
surplice-maker’s assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters of
various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed “Bower
o’ Bliss” and “Freckles”; some horsey men “in the know” of betting
circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two devil-may-care
young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates; they had slipped in
by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups, and stayed to drink and smoke
short pipes with the racing gents aforesaid, looking at their watches
every now and then.
The conversation waxed general. Christminster society was criticized,
the dons, magistrates, and other people in authority being sincerely
pitied for their shortcomings, while opinions on how they ought to
conduct themselves and their affairs to be properly respected, were
exchanged in a large-minded and disinterested manner.
Jude Fawley, with the self-conceit, effrontery, and _aplomb_ of a
strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat
peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many
years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort of
mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the extent
of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that would have
appeared pitiable to himself in his sane hours.
“I don’t care a damn,” he was saying, “for any provost, warden,
principal, fellow, or cursed master of arts in the university! What I
know is that I’d lick ’em on their own ground if they’d give me a
chance, and show ’em a few things they are not up to yet!”
“Hear, hear!” said the undergraduates from the corner, where they were
talking privately about the pups.
“You always was fond o’ books, I’ve heard,” said Tinker Taylor, “and I
don’t doubt what you state. Now with me ’twas different. I always saw
there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my steps
accordingly, or I shouldn’t have been the man I am.”
“You aim at the Church, I believe?” said Uncle Joe. “If you are such a
scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why not give us a
specimen of your scholarship? Canst say the Creed in Latin, man? That
was how they once put it to a chap down in my country.”
“I should think so!” said Jude haughtily.
“Not he! Like his conceit!” screamed one of the ladies.
“Just you shut up, Bower o’ Bliss!” said one of the undergraduates.
“Silence!” He drank off the spirits in his tumbler, rapped with it on
the counter, and announced, “The gentleman in the corner is going to
rehearse the Articles of his Belief, in the Latin tongue, for the
edification of the company.”
“I won’t!” said Jude.
“Yes—have a try!” said the surplice-maker.
“You can’t!” said Uncle Joe.
“Yes, he can!” said Tinker Taylor.
“I’ll swear I can!” said Jude. “Well, come now, stand me a small Scotch
cold, and I’ll do it straight off.”
“That’s a fair offer,” said the undergraduate, throwing down the money
for the whisky.
The barmaid concocted the mixture with the bearing of a person
compelled to live amongst animals of an inferior species, and the glass
was handed across to Jude, who, having drunk the contents, stood up and
began rhetorically, without hesitation:
“_Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Factorem coeli et terrae,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium._”
“Good! Excellent Latin!” cried one of the undergraduates, who, however,
had not the slightest conception of a single word.
A silence reigned among the rest in the bar, and the maid stood still,
Jude’s voice echoing sonorously into the inner parlour, where the
landlord was dozing, and bringing him out to see what was going on.
Jude had declaimed steadily ahead, and was continuing:
“_Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus
est. Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas._”
“That’s the Nicene,” sneered the second undergraduate. “And we wanted
the Apostles’!”
“You didn’t say so! And every fool knows, except you, that the Nicene
is the most historic creed!”
“Let un go on, let un go on!” said the auctioneer.
But Jude’s mind seemed to grow confused soon, and he could not get on.
He put his hand to his forehead, and his face assumed an expression of
pain.
“Give him another glass—then he’ll fetch up and get through it,” said
Tinker Taylor.
Somebody threw down threepence, the glass was handed, Jude stretched
out his arm for it without looking, and having swallowed the liquor,
went on in a moment in a revived voice, raising it as he neared the end
with the manner of a priest leading a congregation:
“_Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre
Filioque procedit. Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et
conglorificatur. Qui locutus est per prophetas._
“_Et unam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam. Confiteor unum Baptisma