JUDE THE OBSCURE (World's Classics Series). Thomas Hardy
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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 re-instating 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 the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.
“Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I’ve never bin there — not I. I’ve never had any business at such a place.”
The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So, stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak open down.
CHAPTER 3
NOT a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the sky. At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green “ridgeway”— the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the district. This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and down almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks and herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and overgrown.
The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the nestling hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a railway station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier, and till now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat, low-lying country lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his upland world. The whole northern semicircle between east and west, to a distance of forty or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a bluer, moister atmosphere, evidently, than that he breathed up here.
Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of reddish-grey brick and tile. It was known as the Brown House by the people of the locality. He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against the eaves; and the reflection that the higher he got, the further he could see, led Jude to stand and regard it. On the slope of the roof two men were repairing the tiling. He turned into the ridgeway and drew towards the barn.
When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some time he took courage, and ascended the ladder till he stood beside them.
“Well, my lad, and what may you want up here?”
“I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is, if you please.”
“Christminster is out across there, by that clump. You can see it — at least you can on a clear day. Ah, no, you can’t now.”
The other tiler, glad of any kind of diversion from the monotony of his labour, had also turned to look towards the quarter designated. “You can’t often see it in weather like this,” he said. “The time I’ve noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame, and it looks like — I don’t