Jude the Obscure
thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till
afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to
liquor—which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an
escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with
despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to
make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life
of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might
not always be victorious.
As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he developed his
slight skill in church-music and thorough-bass, till he could join in
part-singing from notation with some accuracy. A mile or two from
Melchester there was a restored village church, to which Jude had
originally gone to fix the new columns and capitals. By this means he
had become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate result was
that he joined the choir as a bass voice.
He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and sometimes in the
week. One evening about Easter the choir met for practice, and a new
hymn which Jude had heard of as being by a Wessex composer was to be
tried and prepared for the following week. It turned out to be a
strangely emotional composition. As they all sang it over and over
again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly.
When they had finished he went round to the organist to make inquiries.
The score was in manuscript, the name of the composer being at the
head, together with the title of the hymn: “The Foot of the Cross.”
“Yes,” said the organist. “He is a local man. He is a professional
musician at Kennetbridge—between here and Christminster. The vicar
knows him. He was brought up and educated in Christminster traditions,
which accounts for the quality of the piece. I think he plays in the
large church there, and has a surpliced choir. He comes to Melchester
sometimes, and once tried to get the cathedral organ when the post was
vacant. The hymn is getting about everywhere this Easter.”
As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell to musing on
its composer, and the reasons why he composed it. What a man of
sympathies he must be! Perplexed and harassed as he himself was about
Sue and Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the
complication of his position, how he would like to know that man! “He
of all men would understand my difficulties,” said the impulsive Jude.
If there were any person in the world to choose as a confidant, this
composer would be the one, for he must have suffered, and throbbed, and
yearned.
In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey,
Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the
very next Sunday. He duly started, early in the morning, for it was
only by a series of crooked railways that he could get to the town.
About mid-day he reached it, and crossing the bridge into the quaint
old borough he inquired for the house of the composer.
They told him it was a red brick building some little way further on.
Also that the gentleman himself had just passed along the street not
five minutes before.
“Which way?” asked Jude with alacrity.
“Straight along homeward from church.”
Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing a man in a
black coat and a black slouched felt hat no considerable distance
ahead. Stretching out his legs yet more widely, he stalked after. “A
hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul!” he said. “I must speak to that
man!”
He could not, however, overtake the musician before he had entered his
own house, and then arose the question if this were an expedient time
to call. Whether or not he decided to do so there and then, now that he
had got here, the distance home being too great for him to wait till
late in the afternoon. This man of soul would understand scant
ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in which an
earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly obtained entrance into
his heart through the opening afforded for religion.
Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.
The musician came to him in a moment, and being respectably dressed,
good-looking, and frank in manner, Jude obtained a favourable
reception. He was nevertheless conscious that there would be a certain
awkwardness in explaining his errand.
“I have been singing in the choir of a little church near Melchester,”
he said. “And we have this week practised ‘The Foot of the Cross,’
which I understand, sir, that you composed?”
“I did—a year or so ago.”
“I—like it. I think it supremely beautiful!”
“Ah well—other people have said so too. Yes, there’s money in it, if I
could only see about getting it published. I have other compositions to
go with it, too; I wish I could bring them out; for I haven’t made a
five-pound note out of any of them yet. These publishing people—they
want the copyright of an obscure composer’s work, such as mine is, for
almost less than I should have to pay a person for making a fair
manuscript copy of the score. The one you speak of I have lent to
various friends about here and Melchester, and so it has got to be sung
a little. But music is a poor staff to lean on—I am giving it up
entirely. You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays.
The wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my forthcoming
list—it is not issued yet—but you can take one.”
He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in booklet shape,
ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth the
various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines with
which he purposed to initiate his new venture. It took Jude more than
by surprise that the man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt
that he could not open up his confidences.
They talked a little longer, but constrainedly, for when the musician
found that Jude was a poor man his manner changed from what it had been
while Jude’s appearance and address deceived him as to his position and
pursuits. Jude stammered out something about his feelings in wishing to
congratulate the author on such an exalted composition, and took an
embarrassed leave.
All the way home by the slow Sunday train, sitting in the fireless
waiting-rooms on this cold spring day, he was depressed enough at his
simplicity in taking such a journey. But no sooner did he reach his
Melchester lodging than he found awaiting him a letter which had
arrived that morning a few minutes after he had left the house. It was
a contrite little note from Sue, in which she said, with sweet
humility, that she felt she had been horrid in telling him he was not
to come to see her, that she despised herself for having been so
conventional; and that he was to be sure to come by the
eleven-forty-five train that very Sunday, and have dinner with them at
half-past one.
Jude almost tore his hair at having missed this letter till it was too
late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself
considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition to
Kennetbridge really did seem to have been another special intervention
of Providence to keep him away from temptation. But a growing
impatience of faith, which he had noticed in himself more than once of
late, made him pass over in ridicule the idea that God sent people on
fools’ errands. He longed to see her; he was angry at having missed
her: and he wrote instantly, telling her what had happened, and saying
he had not enough patience to wait till the following Sunday, but would
come any day in the week that she liked to name.
Since he wrote a little over-ardently, Sue, as her manner was, delayed
her reply till Thursday before Good Friday, when she said he might come
that afternoon if he wished, this being the earliest day on which she
could welcome him, for she was now assistant-teacher in her husband’s
school. Jude therefore got leave from the cathedral works at the
trifling expense of a stoppage of pay, and went.
Part Fourth AT SHASTON
_“Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of
Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or
Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee.”_—J.
MILTON.
I
Shaston, the ancient British Palladour,
From whose foundation first such strange reports arise,
(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague
imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal
abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its
shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now
ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a
pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless
landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place
of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops,
knights and squires. The bones of King Edward “the Martyr,” carefully
removed hither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which
made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled
it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To
this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as
historians tell us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the
enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin: the
Martyr’s bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and
not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
but strange to say these qualities, which were noted by many writers in
ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed
over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England
stands virtually unvisited to-day.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp,
rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the
deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over
three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being
as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller’s eyes as the
medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to a railway, it can best be
reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly
accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east, that
connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.
Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.
Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within
living memory, horses, donkeys and men may have been seen toiling up
the winding ways to the top of the height, laden with tubs and barrels
filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers retailing their
contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.
This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd facts,
namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof behind
the church, and that in former times the town passed through a curious
period of corruption, conventual and domestic, gave rise to the saying
that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man, such as the
world afforded not elsewhere. It was a place where the churchyard lay
nearer heaven than the church steeple, where beer was more plentiful
than water, and where there were more wanton women than honest wives
and maids. It is also said that after the Middle Ages the inhabitants
were too poor to pay their priests, and hence were compelled to pull
down their churches, and refrain altogether from the public worship of
God; a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of
their inns on Sunday afternoons. In those days the Shastonians were
apparently not without a sense of humour.