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Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
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Part First
AT MARYGREEN
"Yea,
many there be that have run out of their wits
for women,
and become servants
for their sakes.
Many also have perished,
have erred,
and sinned,
for women....
O ye men,
how can it be but women should be strong,
seeing they do thus?"
--ESDRAS.
I THE schoolmaster was leaving the village,
and everybody seemed sorry.
The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse
to carry his goods
to the city of his destination,
about twenty miles off,
such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size
for the departing teacher's effects.
For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers,
and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master,
in addition
to the packing-case of books,
was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music.
But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing,
and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble
to him ever since in moving house.
The rector had gone away
for the day,
being a man who disliked the sight of changes.
He did not mean
to return till the evening,
when the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in,
and everything would be smooth again.
The blacksmith,
the farm bailiff,
and the schoolmaster himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what
to do
with it on his arrival at Christminster,
the city he was bound for,
since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first.
A little boy of eleven,
who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing,
joined the group of men,
and as they rubbed their chins he spoke up,
blushing at the sound of his own voice:
"Aunt have got a great fuel-house,
and it could be put there,
perhaps,
till you've found a place
to settle in,
sir."
"A proper good notion,"
said the blacksmith.
It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy's aunt-- an old maiden resident--and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr. Phillotson should send
for it.
The smith and the bailiff started
to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter,
and the boy and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.
"Sorry I am going,
Jude?"
asked the latter kindly.
Tears rose into the boy's eyes,
for he was not among the regular day scholars,
who came unromantically close
to the schoolmaster's life,
but one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher's term of office.
The regular scholars,
if the truth must be told,
stood at the present moment afar off,
like certain historic disciples,
indisposed
to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.
The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand,
which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift,
and admitted that he was sorry.
"So am I,"
said Mr. Phillotson.
"Why do you go,
sir?"
asked the boy.
"Ah--that would be a long story.
You wouldn't understand my reasons,
Jude.
You will,
perhaps,
when you are older."
"I think I should now,
sir."
"Well--don't speak of this everywhere.
You know what a university is,
and a university degree?
It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants
to do anything in teaching.
My scheme,
or dream,
is
to be a university graduate,
and then
to be ordained.
By going
to live at Christminster,
or near it,
I shall be at headquarters,
so
to speak,
and if my scheme is practicable at all,
I consider that being on the spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have elsewhere."
The smith and his companion returned.
Old Miss Fawley's fuel-house was dry,
and eminently practicable;
and she seemed willing
to give the instrument standing-room there.
It was accordingly left in the school till the evening,
when more hands would be available
for removing it;
and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.
The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles,
and at nine o'clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other IMPEDIMENTA,
and bade his friends good-bye.
"I shan't forget you,
Jude,"
he said,
smiling,
as the cart moved off.
"Be a good boy,
remember;
and be kind
to animals and birds,
and read all you can.
And if ever you come
to Christminster remember you hunt me out
for old acquaintance'
sake."
The cart creaked across the green,
and disappeared round the corner by the rectory-house.
The boy returned
to the draw-well at the edge of the greensward,
where he had left his buckets when he went
to help his patron and teacher in the loading.
There was a quiver in his lip now and after opening the well-cover
to begin lowering the bucket he paused and leant
with his forehead and arms against the framework,
his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child's who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time.
The well into which he was looking was as ancient as the village itself,
and from his present position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
There was a lining of green moss near the top,
and nearer still the hart's-tongue fern.
He said
to himself,
in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning like this,
and would never draw there any more.
"I've seen him look down into it,
when he was tired
with his drawing,
just as I do now,
and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! But he was too clever
to bide here any longer--a small sleepy place like this!"
A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well.
The morning was a little foggy,
and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air.
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outcry:
"Bring on that water,
will ye,
you idle young harlican!"
It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off.
The boy quickly waved a signal of assent,
drew the water
with what was a great effort
for one of his stature,
landed and emptied the big bucket into his own pair of smaller ones,
and pausing a moment
for breath,
started
with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well stood--nearly in the centre of the little village,
or rather hamlet of Marygreen.
It was as old-fashioned as it was small,
and it rested in the lap of an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs.
Old as it was,
however,
the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged.
Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years,
and many trees felled on the green.
Above all,
the original church,
hump-backed,
wood-turreted,
and quaintly hipped,
had been taken down,
and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane,
or utilized as pig-sty walls,
garden seats,
guard-stones
to fences,
and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood.
In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design,
unfamiliar
to English eyes,
had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day.
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple
to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard,
the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny castiron crosses warranted
to last five years.
II SLENDER as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming house-buckets of water
to the cottage without resting.
Over the door was a little rectangular piece of blue board,
on which was painted in yellow letters,
"Drusilla Fawley,
Baker."
Within the little lead panes of the window-- this being one of the few old houses left--were five bottles of sweets,
and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.
While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,
the Drusilla of the sign-board,
and some other villagers.
Having seen the school-master depart,
they were summing up particulars of the event,
and indulging in predictions of his future.
"And who's he?"
asked one,
comparatively a stranger,
when the boy entered.
"Well ye med ask it,
Mrs. WilliaMs. He's my great-nephew--come since you was last this way."
The old inhabitant who answered was a tall,
gaunt woman,
who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject,
and gave a phrase of her conversation
to each auditor in turn.
"He come from Mellstock,
down in South Wessex,
about a year ago--worse luck for
'n,
Belinda"
(turning
to the right)
"where his father was living,
and was 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-shet-ters 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 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.
III 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 know what."
"The heavenly Jerusalem,"
suggested the serious urchin.
"Ay--though I should never ha'
thought of it myself....
But I can't see no Christminster to-day."
The boy strained his eyes also;
yet neither could he see the far-off city.
He descended from the barn,
and abandoning Christminster
with the versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track,
looking
for any natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks thereabout.
When he repassed the barn
to go back
to Marygreen he observed that the ladder was still in its place,
but that the men had finished their day's work and gone away.
It was waning towards evening;
there was still a faint mist,
but it had cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country and along the river-courses.
He thought again of Christminster,
and wished,
since he had come two or three miles from his aunt's house on purpose,
that he could have seen
for once this attractive city of which he had been told.
But even if he waited here it was hardly likely that the air would clear before night.
Yet he was loth
to leave the spot,
for the northern expanse became lost
to view on retreating towards the village only a few hundred yards.
He ascended the ladder
to have one more look at the point the men had designated,
and perched himself on the highest rung,
overlying the tiles.
He might not be able
to come so far as this
for many days.
Perhaps if he prayed,
the wish
to see Christminster might be forwarded.
People said that,
if you prayed,
things sometimes came
to you,
even though they sometimes did not.
He had read in a tract that a man who had begun
to build a church,
and had no money
to finish it,
knelt down and prayed,
and the money came in by the next post.
Another man tried the same experiment,
and the money did not come;
but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew.
This was not discouraging,
and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung,
where,
resting against those above it,
he prayed that the mist might rise.
He then seated himself again,
and waited.
In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon,
as it had already done elsewhere,
and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted,
the sun's position being partially uncovered,
and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud.
The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape,
points of light like the topaz gleamed.
The air increased in transparency
with the lapse of minutes,
till the topaz points showed themselves
to be the vanes,
windows,
wet roof slates,
and other shining spots upon the spires,
domes,
freestone-work,
and varied outlines that were faintly revealed.
It was Christminster,
unquestionably;
either directly seen,
or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.
The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine,
going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles.
The vague city became veiled in mist.
Turning
to the west,
he saw that the sun had disappeared.
The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark,
and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.
He anxiously descended the ladder,
and started homewards at a run,
trying not
to think of giants,
Herne the Hunter,
Apollyon lying in wait
for Christian,
or of the captain
with the bleeding hole in his forehead and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on board the bewitched ship.
He knew that he had grown out of belief in these horrors,
yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights in the cottage windows,
even though this was not the home of his birth,
and his great-aunt did not care much about him.
Inside and round about that old woman's
"shop"
window,
with its twenty-four little panes set in lead-work,
the glass of some of them oxidized
with age,
so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles exhibited within,
and forming part of a stock which a strong man could have carried,
Jude had his outer being
for some long tideless time.
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland
to the northward he was always beholding a gorgeous city--the fancied place he had likened
to the new Jerusalem,
though there was perhaps more of the painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer.
And the city acquired a tangibility,
a permanence,
a hold on his life,
mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man
for whose knowledge and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there;
not only so,
but living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.
In sad wet seasons,
though he knew it must rain at Christminster too,
he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.
Whenever he could get away from the confines of the hamlet
for an hour or two,
which was not often,
he would steal off
to the Brown House on the hill and strain his eyes persistently;
sometimes
to be rewarded by the sight of a dome or spire,
at other times by a little smoke,
which in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.
Then the day came when it suddenly occurred
to him that if he ascended
to the point of view after dark,
or possibly went a mile or two further,
he would see the night lights of the city.
It would be necessary
to come back alone,
but even that consideration did not deter him,
for he could throw a little manliness into his mood,
no doubt.
The project was duly executed.
It was not late when he arrived at the place of outlook,
only just after dusk,
but a black north-east sky,
accompanied by a wind from the same quarter,
made the occasion dark enough.
He was rewarded;
but what he saw was not the lamps in rows,
as he had half expected.
No individual light was visible,
only a halo or glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens behind it,
making the light and the city seem distant but a mile or so.
He set himself
to wonder on the exact point in the glow where the schoolmaster might be--he who never communicated
with anybody at Marygreen now;
who was as if dead
to them here.
In the glow he seemed
to see Phillotson promenading at ease,
like one of the forms in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.
He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour,
and the fact now came into his mind.
He parted his lips as he faced the north-east,
and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor.
"You,"
he said,
addressing the breeze caressingly
"were in Christminster city between one and two hours ago,
floating along the streets,
pulling round the weather-cocks,
touching Mr. Phillotson's face,
being breathed by him;
and now you are here,
breathed by me-- you,
the very same."
Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him-- a message from the place--from some soul residing there,
it seemed.
Surely it was the sound of bells,
the voice of the city,
faint and musical,
calling
to him,
"We are happy here!"
He had become entirely lost
to his bodily situation during this mental leap,
and only got back
to it by a rough recalling.
A few yards below the brow of the hill on which he paused a team of horses made its appearance,
having reached the place by dint of half an hour's serpentine progress from the bottom of the immense declivity.
They had a load of coals behind them-- a fuel that could only be got into the upland by this particular route.
They were accompanied by a carter,
a second man,
and a boy,
who now kicked a large stone behind one of the wheels,
and allowed the panting animals
to have a long rest,
while those in charge took a flagon off the load and indulged in a drink round.
They were elderly men,
and had genial voices.
Jude addressed them,
inquiring if they had come from Christminster.
"Heaven forbid,
with this load!"
said they.
"The place I mean is that one yonder."
He was getting so romantically attached
to Christminster that,
like a young lover alluding
to his mistress,
he felt bashful at mentioning its name again.
He pointed
to the light in the sky--hardly perceptible
to their older eyes.
"Yes.
There do seem a spot a bit brighter in the nor'- east than elsewhere,
though I shouldn't ha'
noticed it myself,
and no doubt it med be Christminster."
Here a little book of tales which Jude had tucked up under his arm,
having brought them
to read on his way hither before it grew dark,
slipped and fell into the road.
The carter eyed him while he picked it up and straightened the leaves.
"Ah,
young man,"
he observed,
"you'd have
to get your head screwed on t'other way before you could read what they read there."
"Why?"
asked the boy.
"Oh,
they never look at anything that folks like we can understand,"
the carter continued,
by way of passing the time.
"On'y foreign tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel,
when no two families spoke alike.
They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir.
'Tis all learning there-- nothing but learning,
except religion.
And that's learning too,
for I never could understand it.
Yes,
'tis a serious-minded place.
Not but there's wenches in the streets o'
nights....
You know,
I suppose,
that they raise pa'sons there like radishes in a bed?
And though it do take--how many years,
Bob?--five years
to turn a lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn preaching man
with no corrupt passions,
they'll do it,
if it can be done,
and polish un off like the workmen they be,
and turn un out wi'
a long face,
and a long black coat and waistcoat,
and a religious collar and hat,
same as they used
to wear in the Scriptures,
so that his own mother wouldn't know un sometimes....
There,
'tis their business,
like anybody else's."
"But how should you know"
"Now don't you interrupt,
my boy.
Never interrupt your senyers.
Move the fore hoss aside,
Bobby;
here's som'at coming....
You must mind that I be a-talking of the college life.
'Em lives on a lofty level;
there's no gainsaying it,
though I myself med not think much of
'em.
As we be here in our bodies on this high ground,
so be they in their minds--noble-minded men enough,
no doubt-- some on
'em--able
to earn hundreds by thinking out loud.
And some on
'em be strong young fellows that can earn a'most as much in silver cups.
As
for music,
there's beautiful music everywhere in Christminster.
You med be religious,
or you med not,
but you can't help striking in your homely note
with the rest.
And there's a street in the place--the main street--that ha'n't another like it in the world.
I should think I did know a little about Christminster!"
By this time the horses had recovered breath and bent
to their collars again.
Jude,
throwing a last adoring look at the distant halo,
turned and walked beside his remarkably well-informed friend,
who had no objection
to telling him as they moved on more yet of the city-- its towers and halls and churches.
The waggon turned into a cross-road,
whereupon Jude thanked the carter warmly
for his information,
and said he only wished he could talk half as well about Christminster as he.
"Well,
'tis oonly what has come in my way,"
said the carter unboastfully.
"I've never been there,
no more than you;
but I've picked up the knowledge here and there,
and you be welcome
to it.
A-getting about the world as I do,
and mixing
with all classes of society,
one can't help hearing of things.
A friend o'
mine,
that used
to clane the boots at the Crozier Hotel in Christminster when he was in his prime,
why,
I knowed un as well as my own brother in his later years."
Jude continued his walk homeward alone,
pondering so deeply that he forgot
to feel timid.
He suddenly grew older.
It had been the yearning of his heart
to find something
to anchor on,
to cling to--for some place which he could call admirable.
Should he find that place in this city if he could get there?
Would it be a spot in which,
without fear of farmers,
or hindrance,
or ridicule,
he could watch and wait,
and set himself
to some mighty undertaking like the men of old of whom he had heard?
As the halo had been
to his eyes when gazing at it a quarter of an hour earlier,
so was the spot mentally
to him as he pursued his dark way.
"It is a city of light,"
he said
to himself.
"The tree of knowledge grows there,"
he added a few steps further on.
"It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to."
"It is what you may call a castle,
manned by scholarship and religion."
After this figure he was silent a long while,
till he added:
"It would just suit me."
IV WALKING somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration,
the boy-- an ancient man in some phases of thought,
much younger than his years in others--was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian,
whom,
notwithstanding the gloom,
he could perceive
to be wearing an extraordinarily tall hat,
a swallow-tailed coat,
and a watch-chain that danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as its owner swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots.
Jude,
beginning
to feel lonely,
endeavoured
to keep up
with him.
"Well,
my man! I'm in a hurry,
so you'll have
to walk pretty fast if you keep alongside of me.
Do you know who I am?"
"Yes,
I think.
Physician Vilbert?"
"Ah--l'm known everywhere,
I see! That comes of being a public benefactor."
Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor,
well known
to the rustic population,
and absolutely unknown
to anybody else,
as he,
indeed,
took care
to be,
to avoid inconvenient investigations.
Cottagers formed his only patients,
and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone.
His position was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the quacks
with capital and an organized system of advertising.
He was,
in fact,
a survival.
The distances he traversed on foot were enormous,
and extended nearly the whole length and breadth of Wessex.
Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of coloured lard
to an old woman as a certain cure
for a bad leg,
the woman arranging
to pay a guinea,
in instalments of a shilling a fortnight,
for the precious salve,
which,
according
to the physician,
could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on Mount Sinai,
and was
to be captured only at great risk
to life and limb.
Jude,
though he already had his doubts about this gentleman's medicines,
felt him
to be unquestionably a travelled personage,
and one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not strictly professional.
"I s'pose you've been
to Christminster,
Physician?"
"I have--many times,"
replied the long thin man.
"That's one of my centres."
"It's a wonderful city
for scholarship and religion?"
"You'd say so,
my boy,
if you'd seen it.
Why,
the very sons of the old women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin-- not good Latin,
that I admit,
as a critic:
dog-Latin--cat-Latin,
as we used
to call it in my undergraduate days."
"And Greek?"
"Well--that's more
for the men who are in training
for bishops,
that they may be able
to read the New Testament in the original."
"I want
to learn Latin and Greek myself."
"A lofty desire.
You must get a grammar of each tongue."
"I mean
to go
to Christminster some day."
"Whenever you do,
you say that Physician Vilbert is the only proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all disorders of the alimentary system,
as well as asthma and shortness of breath.
Two and threepence a box--specially licensed by the government stamp."
"Can you get me the grammars if I promise
to say it hereabout?"
"I'll sell you mine
with pleasure--those I used as a student."
"Oh,
thank you,
sir!"
said Jude gratefully,
but in gasps,
for the amazing speed of the physician's walk kept him in a dog-trot which was giving him a stitch in the side.
"I think you'd better drop behind,
my young man.
Now I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll get you the grammars,
and give you a first lesson,
if you'll remember,
at every house in the village,
to recommend Physician Vilbert's golden ointment,
life-drops,
and female pills."
"Where will you be
with the grammars?"
"I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of five-and-twenty minutes past seven.
My movements are as truly timed as those of the planets in their courses."
"Here I'll be
to meet you,"
said Jude.
"With orders
for my medicines?"
"Yes,
Physician."
Jude then dropped behind,
waited a few minutes
to recover breath,
and went home
with a consciousness of having struck a blow
for Christminster.
Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly at his inward thoughts,
as if they were people meeting and nodding
to him-- smiled
with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen
to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea,
as if a supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures,
giving rise
to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.
He honestly performed his promise
to the man of many cures,
in whom he now sincerely believed,
walking miles hither and thither among the surrounding hamlets as the Physician's agent in advance.
On the evening appointed he stood motionless on the plateau,
at the place where he had parted from Vilbert,
and there awaited his approach.
The road-physician was fairly up
to time;
but,
to the surprise of Jude on striking into his pace,
which the pedestrian did not diminish by a single unit of force,
the latter seemed hardly
to recognize his young companion,
though
with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings had grown light.
Jude thought it might perhaps be owing
to his wearing another hat,
and he saluted the physician
with dignity.
"Well,
my boy?"
said the latter abstractedly.
"I've come,"
said Jude.
"You?
who are you?
Oh yes--to be sure! Got any orders,
lad?"
"Yes."
And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers who were willing
to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and salve.
The quack mentally registered these
with great care.
"And the Latin and Greek grammars?"
Jude's voice trembled
with anxiety.
"What about them?"
"You were
to bring me yours,
that you used before you took your degree."
"Ah,
yes,
yes! Forgot all about it--all! So many lives depending on my attention,
you see,
my man,
that I can't give so much thought as I would like
to other things."
Jude controlled himself sufficiently long
to make sure of the truth;
and he repeated,
in a voice of dry misery,
"You haven't brought
'em!"
"No.
But you must get me some more orders from sick people,
and I'll bring the grammars next time."
Jude dropped behind.
He was an unsophisticated boy,
but the gift of sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed
to children showed him all at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of.
There was
to be no intellectual light from this source.
The leaves dropped from his imaginary crown of laurel;
he turned
to a gate,
leant against it,
and cried bitterly.
The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness.
He might,
perhaps,
have obtained grammars from Alfredston,
but
to do that required money,
and a knowledge of what books
to order;
and though physically comfortable,
he was in such absolute dependence as
to be without a farthing of his own.
At this date Mr. Phillotson sent
for his pianoforte,
and it gave Jude a lead.
Why should he not write
to the schoolmaster,
and ask him
to be so kind as
to get him the grammars in Christminster?
He might slip a letter inside the case of the instrument,
and it would be sure
to reach the desired eyes.
Why not ask him
to send any old second-hand copies,
which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university atmosphere?
To tell his aunt of his intention would be
to defeat it.
It was necessary
to act alone.
After a further consideration of a few days he did act,
and on the day of the piano's departure,
which happened
to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case,
directed
to his much-admired friend,
being afraid
to reveal the operation
to his aunt Drusilla,
lest she should discover his motive,
and compel him
to abandon his scheme.
The piano was despatched,
and Jude waited days and weeks,
calling every morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was stirring.
At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village,
and he saw from the ends of it that it contained two thin books.
He took it away into a lonely place,
and sat down on a felled elm
to open it.
Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities,
Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another.
He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain,
primarily,
a rule,
prescription,
or clue of the nature of a secret cipher,
which,
once known,
would enable him,
by merely applying it,
to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one.
His childish idea was,
in fact,
a pushing
to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm's Law-- an aggrandizement of rough rules
to ideal completeness.
Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always
to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art
to uncover them,
such art being furnished by the books aforesaid.
When,
therefore,
having noted that the packet bore the postmark of Christminster,
he cut the string,
opened the volumes,
and turned
to the Latin grammar,
which chanced
to come uppermost,
he could scarcely believe his eyes.
The book was an old one--thirty years old,
soiled,
scribbled wantonly over
with a strange name in every variety of enmity
to the letterpress,
and marked at random
with dates twenty years earlier than his own day.
But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement.
He learnt
for the first time that there was no law of transmutation,
as in his innocence he had supposed
(there was,
in some degree,
but the grammarian did not recognize it),
but that every word in both Latin and Greek was
to be individually committed
to memory at the cost of years of plodding.
Jude flung down the books,
lay backward along the broad trunk of the elm,
and was an utterly miserable boy
for the space of a quarter of an hour.
As he had often done before,
he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw.
This was Latin and Greek,
then,
was it this grand delusion! The charm he had supposed in store
for him was really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.
What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools,
he presently thought,
to learn words one by one up
to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal
to this business;
and as the little sun-rays continued
to stream in through his hat at him,
he wished he had never seen a book,
that he might never see another,
that he had never been born.
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble,
and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian.
But nobody did come,
because nobody does;
and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued
to wish himself out of the world.
V DURING the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular vehicle might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads near Marygreen,
driven in a quaint and singular way.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books Jude had grown callous
to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages.
In fact,
his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had,
after a while,
been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster.
To acquire languages,
departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently
to possess,
was a herculean performance which gradually led him on
to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent process.
The mountain-weight of material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the classics piqued him into a dogged,
mouselike subtlety of attempt
to move it piecemeal.
He had endeavoured
to make his presence tolerable
to his crusty maiden aunt by assisting her
to the best of his ability,
and the business of the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence.
An aged horse
with a hanging head had been purchased
for eight pounds at a sale,
a creaking cart
with a whity-brown tilt obtained
for a few pounds more,
and in this turn-out it became Jude's business thrice a week
to carry loaves of bread
to the villagers and solitary cotters immediately round Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay,
after all,
less in the conveyance itself than in Jude's manner of conducting it along its route.
Its interior was the scene of most of Jude's education by
"private study."
As soon as the horse had learnt the road and the houses at which he was
to pause awhile,
the boy,
seated in front,
would slip the reins over his arm,
ingeniously fix open,
by means of a strap attached
to the tilt,
the volume he was reading,
spread the dictionary on his knees,
and plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar,
Virgil,
or Horace,
as the case might be,
in his purblind stumbling way,
and
with an expenditure of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears;
yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read,
and divining rather than beholding the spirit of the original,
which often
to his mind was something else than that which he was taught
to look for.
The only copies he had been able
to lay hands on were old Delphin editions,
because they were superseded,
and therefore cheap.
But,
bad
for idle schoolboys,
it did so happen that they were passably good
for him.
The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the marginal readings,
and used them merely on points of construction,
as he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened
to be passing by.
And though Jude may have had little chance of becoming a scholar by these rough and ready means,
he was in the way of getting into the groove he wished
to follow.
While he was busied
with these ancient pages,
which had already been thumbed by hands possibly in the grave,
digging out the thoughts of these minds so remote yet so near,
the bony old horse pursued his rounds,
and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the stoppage of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying,
"Two to-day,
baker,
and I return this stale one."
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without his seeing them,
and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood began
to talk about his method of combining work and play
(such they considered his reading
to be),
which,
though probably convenient enough
to himself,
was not altogether a safe proceeding
for other travellers along the same roads.
There were murmurs.
Then a private resident of an adjoining place informed the local policeman that the baker's boy should not be allowed
to read while driving,
and insisted that it was the constable's duty
to catch him in the act,
and take him
to the police court at Alfredston,
and get him fined
for dangerous practices on the highway.
The policeman thereupon lay in wait
for Jude,
and one day accosted him and cautioned him.
As Jude had
to get up at three o'clock in the morning
to heat the oven,
and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the day,
he was obliged
to go
to bed at night immediately after laying the sponge;
so that if he could not read his classics on the highways he could hardly study at all.
The only thing
to be done was,
therefore,
to keep a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could in the circumstances,
and slip away his books as soon as anybody loomed in the distance,
the policeman in particular.
To do that official justice,
he did not put himself much in the way of Jude's bread-cart,
considering that in such a lonely district the chief danger was
to Jude himself,
and often on seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in another direction.
On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced,
being now about sixteen,
and had been stumbling through the
"Carmen Saeculare,"
on his way home,
he found himself
to be passing over the high edge of the plateau by the Brown House.
The light had changed,
and it was the sense of this which had caused him
to look up.
The sun was going down,
and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the opposite quarter.
His mind had become so impregnated
with the poem that,
in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had caused him
to kneel on the ladder,
he stopped the horse,
alighted,
and glancing round
to see that nobody was in sight,
knelt down on the roadside bank
with open book.
He turned first
to the shiny goddess,
who seemed
to look so softly and critically at his doings,
then
to the disappearing luminary on the other hand,
as he began:
"Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana!"
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn,
which Jude repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never have thought of humouring in broad daylight.
Reaching home,
he mused over his curious superstition,
innate or acquired,
in doing this,
and the strange forgetfulness which had led
to such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished,
next
to being a scholar,
to be a Christian divine.
It had all come of reading heathen works exclusively.
The more he thought of it the more convinced he was of his inconsistency.
He began
to wonder whether he could be reading quite the right books
for his object in life.
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediaeval colleges at Christminster,
that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken up a wrong emotion
for a Christian young man.
He had dabbled in Clarke's Homer,
but had never yet worked much at the New Testament in the Greek,
though he possessed a copy,
obtained by post from a second-hand bookseller.
He abandoned the now familiar Ionic
for a new dialect,
and
for a long time onward limited his reading almost entirely
to the Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach's text.
Moreover,
on going into Alfredston one day,
he was introduced
to patristic literature by finding at the bookseller's some volumes of the Fathers which had been left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.
As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all the churches within a walk,
and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on fifteenth-century brasses and tombs.
On one of these pilgrimages he met
with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence,
who read everything she could lay her hands on,
and she told him more yet of the romantic charms of the city of light and lore.
Thither he resolved as firmly as ever
to go.
But how live in that city?
At present he had no income at all.
He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might spread over many years.
What was most required by citizens?
Food,
clothing,
and shelter.
An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre;
for making the second he felt a distaste;
the preparation of the third requisite he inclined to.
They built in a city;
therefore he would learn
to build.
He thought of his unknown uncle,
his cousin Susanna's father,
an ecclesiastical worker in metal,
and somehow mediaeval art in any material was a trade
for which he had rather a fancy.
He could not go far wrong in following his uncle's footsteps,
and engaging himself awhile
with the carcases that contained the scholar souls.
As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone,
metal not being available,
and suspending his studies awhile,
occupied his spare half-hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish church.
There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston,
and as soon as he had found a substitute
for himself in his aunt's little business,
he offered his services
to this man
for a trifling wage.
Here Jude had the opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of freestone-working.
Some time later he went
to a church-builder in the same place,
and under the architect's direction became handy at restoring the dilapidated masonries of several village churches round about.
Not forgetting that he was only following up this handicraft as a prop
to lean on while he prepared those greater engines which he flattered himself would be better fitted
for him,
he yet was interested in his pursuit on its own account.
He now had lodgings during the week in the little town,
whence he returned
to Marygreen village every Saturday evening.
And thus he reached and passed his nineteenth year.
VI AT this memorable date of his life he was,
one Saturday,
returning from Alfredston
to Marygreen about three o'clock in the afternoon.
It was fine,
warm,
and soft summer weather,
and he walked
with his tools at his back,
his little chisels clinking faintly against the larger ones in his basket.
It being the end of the week he had left work early,
and had come out of the town by a round-about route which he did not usually frequent,
having promised
to call at a flour-mill near Cresscombe
to execute a commission
for his aunt.
He was in an enthusiastic mood.
He seemed
to see his way
to living comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two,
and knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of which he had dreamed so much.
He might,
of course,
have gone there now,
in some capacity or other,
but he preferred
to enter the city
with a little more assurance as
to means than he could be said
to feel at present.
A warm self-content suffused him when he considered what he had already done.
Now and then as he went along he turned
to face the peeps of country on either side of him.
But he hardly saw them;
the act was an automatic repetition of what he had been accustomed
to do when less occupied;
and the one matter which really engaged him was the mental estimate of his progress thus far.
"I have acquired quite an average student's power
to read the common ancient classics,
Latin in particular."
This was true,
Jude possessing a facility in that language which enabled him
with great ease
to himself
to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary conversations therein.
"I have read two books of the ILIAD,
besides being pretty familiar
with passages such as the speech of Phoenix in the ninth book,
the fight of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth,
the appearance of Achilles unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth,
and the funeral games in the twenty-third.
I have also done some Hesiod,
a little scrap of Thucydides,
and a lot of the Greek Testament....
I wish there was only one dialect all the same.
"I have done some mathematics,
including the first six and the eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid;
and algebra as far as simple equations.
"I know something of the Fathers,
and something of Roman and English history.
"These things are only a beginning.
But I shall not make much farther advance here,
from the difficulty of getting books.
Hence I must next concentrate all my energies on settling in Christminster.
Once there I shall so advance,
with the assistance I shall there get,
that my present knowledge will appear
to me but as childish ignorance.
I must save money,
and I will;
and one of those colleges shall open its doors
to me--shall welcome whom now it would spurn,
if I wait twenty years
for the welcome.
"I'll be D.D.
before I have done!"
And then he continued
to dream,
and thought he might become even a bishop by leading a pure,
energetic,
wise,
Christian life.
And what an example he would set! If his income were 5000 pounds a year,
he would give away 4500 pounds in one form and another,
and live sumptuously
(for him)
on the remainder.
Well,
on second thoughts,
a bishop was absurd.
He would draw the line at an archdeacon.
Perhaps a man could be as good and as learned and as useful in the capacity of archdeacon as in that of bishop.
Yet he thought of the bishop again.
"Meanwhile I will read,
as soon as I am settled in Christminster,
the books I have not been able
to get hold of here:
Livy,
Tacitus,
Herodotus,
AEschylus,
Sophocles,
Aristophanes--"
"Ha,
ha,
ha! Hoity-toity!"
The sounds were expressed in light voices on the other side of the hedge,
but he did not notice them.
His thoughts went on:
"--Euripides,
Plato,
Aristotle,
Lucretius,
Epictetus,
Seneca,
Antoninus.
Then I must master other things:
the Fathers thoroughly;
Bede and ecclesiastical history generally;
a smattering of Hebrew-- I only know the letters as yet--"
"Hoity-toity!"
"--but I can work hard.
I have staying power in abundance,
thank God! and it is that which tells....
Yes,
Christminster shall be my Alma Mater;
and I'll be her beloved son,
in whom she shall be well pleased."
In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude's walk had slackened,
and he was now standing quite still,
looking at the ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern.
On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear,
and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him,
and had fallen at his feet.
A glance told him what it was--a piece of flesh,
the characteristic part of a barrow-pig,
which the countrymen used
for greasing their boots,
as it was useless
for any other purpose.
Pigs were rather plentiful hereabout,
being bred and fattened in large numbers in certain parts of North Wessex.
On the other side of the hedge was a stream,
whence,
as he now
for the first time realized,
had come the slight sounds of voices and laughter that had mingled
with his dreaMs. He mounted the bank and looked over the fence.
On the further side of the stream stood a small homestead,
having a garden and pig-sties attached;
in front of it,
beside the brook,
three young women were kneeling,
with buckets and platters beside them containing heaps of pigs'
chitterlings,
which they were washing in the running water.
One or two pairs of eyes slyly glanced up,
and perceiving that his attention had at last been attracted,
and that he was watching them,
they braced themselves
for inspection by putting their mouths demurely into shape and recommencing their rinsing operations
with assiduity.
"Thank you!"
said Jude severely.
"I DIDN'T throw it,
I tell you!"
asserted one girl
to her neighbour,
as if unconscious of the young man's presence.
"Nor I,"
the second answered.
"Oh,
Anny,
how can you!"
said the third.
"If I had thrown anything at all,
it shouldn't have been THAT!"
"Pooh! I don't care
for him!"
And they laughed and continued their work,
without looking up,
still ostentatiously accusing each other.
Jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face,
and caught their remarks.
"YOU didn't do it--oh no!"
he said
to the up-stream one of the three.
She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl,
not exactly handsome,
but capable of passing as such at a little distance,
despite some coarseness of skin and fibre.
She had a round and prominent bosom,
full lips,
perfect teeth,
and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen's egg.
She was a complete and substantial female animal--no more,
no less;
and Jude was almost certain that
to her was attributable the enterprise of attracting his attention from dreams of the humaner letters
to what was simmering in the minds around him.
"That you'll never be told,"
said she deedily.
"Whoever did it was wasteful of other people's property."
"Oh,
that's nothing."
"But you want
to speak
to me,
I suppose?"
"Oh yes;
if you like to."
"Shall I clamber across,
or will you come
to the plank above here?"
Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity;
for somehow or other the eyes of the brown girl rested in his own when he had said the words,
and there was a momentary flash of intelligence,
a dumb announcement of affinity IN POSSE between herself and him,
which,
so far as Jude Fawley was concerned,
had no sort of premeditation in it.
She saw that he had singled her out from the three,
as a woman is singled out in such cases,
for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance,
but in commonplace obedience
to conjunctive orders from headquarters,
unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of their lives is
to be occupied
with the feminine.
Springing
to her feet,
she said:
"Bring back what is lying there."
Jude was now aware that no message on any matter connected
with her father's business had prompted her signal
to him.
He set down his basket of tools,
picked up the scrap of offal,
beat a pathway
for himself
with his stick,
and got over the hedge.
They walked in parallel lines,
one on each bank of the stream,
towards the small plank bridge.
As the girl drew nearer
to it,
she gave without Jude perceiving it,
an adroit little suck
to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession,
by which curious and original manoeuvre she brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple,
which she was able
to retain there as long as she continued
to smile.
This production of dimples at will was a not unknown operation,
which many attempted,
but only a few succeeded in accomplishing.
They met in the middle of the plank,
and Jude,
tossing back her missile,
seemed
to expect her
to explain why she had audaciously stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him.
But she,
slyly looking in another direction,
swayed herself backwards and forwards on her hand as it clutched the rail of the bridge;
till,
moved by amatory curiosity,
she turned her eyes critically upon him.
"You don't think I would shy things at you?"
"Oh no."
"We are doing this
for my father,
who naturally doesn't want anything thrown away.
He makes that into dubbin."
She nodded towards the fragment on the grass.
"What made either of the others throw it,
I wonder?"
Jude asked,
politely accepting her assertion,
though he had very large doubts as
to its truth.
"Impudence.
Don't tell folk it was I,
mind!"
"How can I?
I don't know your name."
"Ah,
no.
Shall I tell it
to you?"
"Do!"
"Arabella Donn.
I'm living here."
"I must have known it if I had often come this way.
But I mostly go straight along the high-road."
"My father is a pig-breeder,
and these girls are helping me wash the innerds
for black-puddings and such like."
They talked a little more and a little more,
as they stood regarding each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge.
The unvoiced call of woman
to man,
which was uttered very distinctly by Arabella's personality,
held Jude
to the spot against his intention-- almost against his will,
and in a way new
to his experience.
It is scarcely an exaggeration
to say that till this moment Jude had never looked at a woman
to consider her as such,
but had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes.
He gazed from her eyes
to her mouth,
thence
to her bosom,
and
to her full round naked arms,
wet,
mottled
with the chill of the water,
and firm as marble.
"What a nice-looking girl you are!"
he murmured,
though the words had not been necessary
to express his sense of her magnetism.
"Ah,
you should see me Sundays!"
she said piquantly.
"I don't suppose I could?"
he answered
"That's
for you
to think on.
There's nobody after me just now,
though there med be in a week or two."
She had spoken this without a smile,
and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely,
but could not help it.
"Will you let me?"
"I don't mind."
By this time she had managed
to get back one dimple by turning her face aside
for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation before mentioned,
Jude being still unconscious of more than a general impression of her appearance.
"Next Sunday?"
he hazarded.
"To-morrow,
that is?"
"Yes."
"Shall I call?"
"Yes."
She brightened
with a little glow of triumph,
swept him almost tenderly
with her eyes in turning,
and retracing her steps down the brookside grass rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,
filled
with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze.
He had just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere,
which had evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went,
for he knew not how long,
but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.
The intentions as
to reading,
working,
and learning,
which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier,
were suffering a curious collapse into a corner,
he knew not how.
"Well,
it's only a bit of fun,"
he said
to himself,
faintly conscious that
to common sense there was something lacking,
and still more obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had drawn him
to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her-- something in her quite antipathetic
to that side of him which had been occupied
with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream.
It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile
for opening her attack on him.
He saw this
with his intellectual eye,
just
for a short;
fleeting while,
as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness.
And then this passing discriminative power was withdrawn,
and Jude was lost
to all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure,
that of having found a new channel
for emotional interest hitherto unsuspected,
though it had lain close beside him.
He was
to meet this enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions,
and she silently resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid stream.
"Catched un,
my dear?"
laconically asked the girl called Anny.
"I don't know.
I wish I had thrown something else than that!"
regretfully murmured Arabella.
"Lord! he's nobody,
though you med think so.
He used
to drive old Drusilla Fawley's bread-cart out at Marygreen,
till he
'prenticed himself at Alfredston.
Since then he's been very stuck up,
and always reading.
He wants
to be a scholar,
they say."
"Oh,
I don't care what he is,
or anything about
'n.
Don't you think it,
my child!"
"Oh,
don't ye! You needn't try
to deceive us! What did you stay talking
to him for,
if you didn't want un?
Whether you do or whether you don't,
he's as simple as a child.
I could see it as you courted on the bridge,
when he looked at
'ee as if he had never seen a woman before in his born days.
Well,
he's
to be had by any woman who can get him
to care
for her a bit,
if she likes
to set herself
to catch him the right way."
VII THE next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom
with the sloping ceiling,
looking at the books on the table,
and then at the black mark on the plaster above them,
made by the smoke of his lamp in past months.
It was Sunday afternoon,
four-and-twenty hours after his meeting
with Arabella Donn.
During the whole bygone week he had been resolving
to set this afternoon apart
for a special purpose,--the re-reading of his Greek Testament--his new one,
with better type than his old copy,
following Griesbach's text as amended by numerous correctors,
and
with variorum readings in the margin.
He was proud of the book,
having obtained it by boldly writing
to its London publisher,
a thing he had never done before.
He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon's reading,
under the quiet roof of his great-aunt's house as formerly,
where he now slept only two nights a week.
But a new thing,
a great hitch,
had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life,
and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin,
and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.
He would not go out
to meet her,
after all.
He sat down,
opened the book,
and
with his elbows firmly planted on the table,
and his hands
to his temples began at the beginning:
[Three Greek words] Had he promised
to call
for her?
Surely he had! She would wait indoors,
poor girl,
and waste all her afternoon on account of him.
There was a something in her,
too,
which was very winning,
apart from promises.
He ought not
to break faith
with her.
Even though he had only Sundays and week-day evenings
for reading he could afford one afternoon,
seeing that other young men afforded so many.
After to-day he would never probably see her again.
Indeed,
it would be impossible,
considering what his plans were.
In short,
as if materially,
a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him--something which had nothing in common
with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto.
This seemed
to care little
for his reason and his will,
nothing
for his so-called elevated intentions,
and moved him along,
as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar,
in a direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman
for whom he had no respect,
and whose life had nothing in common
with his own except locality.
[Three Greek words] was no more heeded,
and the predestinate Jude sprang up and across the room.
Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed himself in his best clothes.
In three minutes he was out of the house and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.
As he walked he looked at his watch.
He could be back in two hours,
easily,
and a good long time would still remain
to him
for reading after tea.
Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path joined the highway he hastened along,
and struck away
to the left,
descending the steep side of the country
to the west of the Brown House.
Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it,
and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling.
A smell of piggeries came from the back,
and the grunting of the originators of that smell.
He entered the garden,
and knocked at the door
with the knob of his stick.
Somebody had seen him through the window,
for a male voice on the inside said:
"Arabella! Here's your young man come coorting! Mizzle,
my girl!"
Jude winced at the words.
Courting in such a business-like aspect as it evidently wore
to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking of.
He was going
to walk
with her,
perhaps kiss her;
but
"courting"
was too coolly purposeful
to be anything but repugnant
to his ideas.
The door was opened and he entered,
just as Arabella came downstairs in radiant walking attire.
"Take a chair,
Mr. What's-your-name?"
said her father,
an energetic,
black-whiskered man,
in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard from outside.
"I'd rather go out at once,
wouldn't you?"
she whispered
to Jude.
"Yes,"
said he.
"We'll walk up
to the Brown House and back,
we can do it in half an hour."
Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt glad he had come,
and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto haunted him.
First they clambered
to the top of the great down,
during which ascent he had occasionally
to take her hand
to assist her.
Then they bore off
to the left along the crest into the ridgeway,
which they followed till it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid,
the spot of his former fervid desires
to behold Christminster.
But he forgot them now.
He talked the commonest local twaddle
to Arabella
with greater zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies
with all the Dons in the recently adored university,
and passed the spot where he had knelt
to Diana and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people in the mythology,
or that the sun was anything else than a useful lamp
for illuminating Arabella's face.
An indescribable lightness of heel served
to lift him along;
and Jude,
the incipient scholar,
prospective D.D.,
professor,
bishop,
or what not,
felt himself honoured and glorified by the condescension of this handsome country wench in agreeing
to take a walk
with him in her Sunday frock and ribbons.
They reached the Brown House barn--the point at which he had planned
to turn back.
While looking over the vast northern landscape from this spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke from the neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a distance of a couple of miles.
"It is a fire,"
said Arabella.
"Let's run and see it--do! It is not far!"
The tenderness which had grown up in Jude's bosom left him no will
to thwart her inclination now--which pleased him in affording him excuse
for a longer time
with her.
They started off down the hill almost at a trot;
but on gaining level ground at the bottom,
and walking a mile,
they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than it had seemed.
Having begun their journey,
however,
they pushed on;
but it was not till five o'clock that they found themselves on the scene,-- the distance being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen,
and three from Arabella's.
The conflagration had been got under by the time they reached it,
and after a short inspection of the melancholy ruins they retraced their steps--their course lying through the town of Alfredston.
Arabella said she would like some tea,
and they entered an inn of an inferior class,
and gave their order.
As it was not
for beer they had a long time
to wait.
The maid-servant recognized Jude,
and whispered her surprise
to her mistress in the background,
that he,
the student
"who kept hisself up so particular,"
should have suddenly descended so low as
to keep company
with Arabella.
The latter guessed what was being said,
and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her lover--the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room,
and at the picture of Samson and Delilah which hung on the wall,
and at the circular beer-stains on the table,
and at the spittoons underfoot filled
with sawdust.
The whole aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which few places can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when the setting sun is slanting in,
and no liquor is going,
and the unfortunate wayfarer finds himself
with no other haven of rest.
It began
to grow dusk.
They could not wait longer,
really,
for the tea,
they said.
"Yet what else can we do?"
asked Jude.
"It is a three-mile walk
for you."
"I suppose we can have some beer,"
said Arabella.
"Beer,
oh yes.
I had forgotten that.
Somehow it seems odd
to come
to a public-house
for beer on a Sunday evening."
"But we didn't."
"No,
we didn't."
Jude by this time wished he was out of such an uncongenial atmosphere;
but he ordered the beer,
which was promptly brought.
Arabella tasted it.
"Ugh!"
she said.
Jude tasted.
"What's the matter
with it?"
he asked.
"I don't understand beer very much now,
it is true.
I like it well enough,
but it is bad
to read on,
and I find coffee better.
But this seems all right."
"Adulterated--I can't touch it!"
She mentioned three or four ingredients that she detected in the liquor beyond malt and hops,
much
to Jude's surprise.
"How much you know!"
he said good-humouredly.
Nevertheless she returned
to the beer and drank her share,
and they went on their way.
It was now nearly dark,
and as soon as they had withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer together,
till they touched each other.
She wondered why he did not put his arm round her waist,
but he did not;
he merely said what
to himself seemed a quite bold enough thing:
"Take my arm."
She took it,
thoroughly,
up
to the shoulder.
He felt the warmth of her body against his,
and putting his stick under his other arm held
with his right hand her right as it rested in its place.
"Now we are well together,
dear,
aren't we?"
he observed.
"Yes,"
said she;
adding
to herself:
"Rather mild!"
"How fast I have become!"
he was thinking.
Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland,
where they could see the white highway ascending before them in the gloom.
From this point the only way of getting
to Arabella's was by going up the incline,
and dipping again into her valley on the right.
Before they had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been walking on the grass unseen.
"These lovers--you find
'em out o'
doors in all seasons and weathers-- lovers and homeless dogs only,"
said one of the men as they vanished down the hill.
Arabella tittered lightly.
"Are we lovers?"
asked Jude.
"You know best."
"But you can tell me?"
For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder.
Jude took the hint,
and encircling her waist
with his arm,
pulled her
to him and kissed her.
They walked now no longer arm in arm but,
as she had desired,
clasped together.
After all,
what did it matter since it was dark,
said Jude
to himself.
When they were half-way up the long hill they paused as by arrangement,
and he kissed her again.
They reached the top,
and he kissed her once more.
"You can keep your arm there,
if you would like to,"
she said gently.
He did so,
thinking how trusting she was.
Thus they slowly went towards her home.
He had left his cottage at half-past three,
intending
to be sitting down again
to the New Testament by half-past five.
It was nine o'clock when,
with another embrace,
he stood
to deliver her up at her father's door.
She asked him
to come in,
if only
for a minute,
as it would seem so odd otherwise,
and as if she had been out alone in the dark.
He gave way,
and followed her in.
Immediately that the door was opened he found,
in addition
to her parents,
several neighbours sitting round.
They all spoke in a congratulatory manner,
and took him seriously as Arabella's intended partner.
They did not belong
to his set or circle,
and he felt out of place and embarrassed.
He had not meant this:
a mere afternoon of pleasant walking
with Arabella,
that was all he had meant.
He did not stay longer than
to speak
to her stepmother,
a simple,
quiet woman without features or character;
and bidding them all good night plunged
with a sense of relief into the track over the down.
But that sense was only temporary:
Arabella soon re-asserted her sway in his soul.
He walked as if he felt himself
to be another man from the Jude of yesterday.
What were his books
to him?
what were his intentions,
hitherto adhered
to so strictly,
as
to not wasting a single minute of time day by day?
"Wasting!"
It depended on your point of view
to define that:
he was just living
for the first time:
not wasting life.
It was better
to love a woman than
to be a graduate,
or a parson;
ay,
or a pope! When he got back
to the house his aunt had gone
to bed,
and a general consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things confronting him.
He went upstairs without a light,
and the dim interior of his room accosted him
with sad inquiry.
There lay his book open,
just as he had left it,
and the capital letters on the title-page regarded him
with fixed reproach in the grey starlight,
like the unclosed eyes of a dead man:
[Three Greek words.] Jude had
to leave early next morning
for his usual week of absence at lodgings;
and it was
with a sense of futility that he threw into his basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had brought
with him.
He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself.
Arabella,
on the contrary,
made them public among all her friends and acquaintance.
Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours earlier under cover of darkness,
with his sweetheart by his side,
he reached the bottom of the hill,
where he walked slowly,
and stood still.
He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss.
As the sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed there since.
Jude looked on the ground and sighed.
He looked closely,
and could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of their feet as they had stood locked in each other's arMs. She was not there now,
and
"the embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of nature"
so depicted her past presence that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill.
A pollard willow stood close
to the place,
and that willow was different from all other willows in the world.
Utter annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he could see her again as he had promised would have been his intensest wish if he had had only the week
to live.
An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way
with her two companions of the Saturday.
She passed unheedingly the scene of the kiss,
and the willow that marked it,
though chattering freely on the subject
to the other two.
"And what did he tell
'ee next?"
"Then he said--"
And she related almost word
for word some of his tenderest speeches.
If Jude had been behind the fence he would have felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings and doings on the previous evening were private.
"You've got him
to care for
'ee a bit,
'nation if you han't!"
murmured Anny judicially.
"It's well
to be you!"
In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low,
hungry tone of latent sensuousness:
"I've got him
to care
for me:
yes! But I want him
to more than care
for me;
I want him
to have me--to marry me! I must have him.
I can't do without him.
He's the sort of man I long for.
I shall go mad if I can't give myself
to him altogether! I felt I should when I first saw him!"
"As he is a romancing,
straightfor'ard,
honest chap,
he's
to be had,
and as a husband,
if you set about catching him in the right way."
Arabella remained thinking awhile.
"What med be the right way?"
she asked.
"Oh you don't know--you don't!"
said Sarah,
the third girl.
"On my word I don't!--No further,
that is,
than by plain courting,
and taking care he don't go too far!"
The third girl looked at the second.
"She DON'T know!"
"'Tis clear she don't!"
said Anny.
"And having lived in a town,
too,
as one may say! Well,
we can teach
'ee som'at then,
as well as you us."
"Yes.
And how do you mean--a sure way
to gain a man?
Take me
for an innocent,
and have done wi'
it!"
"As a husband."
"As a husband."
"A countryman that's honourable and serious-minded such as he;
God forbid that I should say a sojer,
or sailor,
or commercial gent from the towns,
or any of them that be slippery
with poor women! I'd do no friend that harm!"
"Well,
such as he,
of course!"
Arabella's companions looked at each other,
and turning up their eyes in drollery began smirking.
Then one went up close
to Arabella,
and,
although nobody was near,
imparted some information in a low tone,
the other observing curiously the effect upon Arabella.
"Ah!"
said the last-named slowly.
"I own I didn't think of that way! ...
But suppose he ISN'T honourable?
A woman had better not have tried it!"
"Nothing venture nothing have! Besides,
you make sure that he's honourable before you begin.
You'd be safe enough
with yours.
I wish I had the chance! Lots of girls do it;
or do you think they'd get married at all?"
Arabella pursued her way in silent thought.
"I'll try it!"
she whispered;
but not
to them.
VIII ONE week's end Jude was as usual walking out
to his aunt's at Marygreen from his lodging in Alfredston,
a walk which now had large attractions
for him quite other than his desire
to see his aged and morose relative.
He diverged
to the right before ascending the hill
with the single purpose of gaining,
on his way,
a glimpse of Arabella that should not come into the reckoning of regular appointments.
Before quite reaching the homestead his alert eye perceived the top of her head moving quickly hither and thither over the garden hedge.
Entering the gate he found that three young unfattened pigs had escaped from their sty by leaping clean over the top,
and that she was endeavouring unassisted
to drive them in through the door which she had set open.
The lines of her countenance changed from the rigidity of business
to the softness of love when she saw Jude,
and she bent her eyes languishingly upon him.
The animals took a vantage of the pause by doubling and bolting out of the way.
"They were only put in this morning!"
she cried,
stimulated
to pursue in spite of her lover's presence.
They were drove from Spaddleholt Farm only yesterday,
where Father bought
'em at a stiff price enough.
They are wanting
to get home again,
the stupid toads! Will you shut the garden gate,
dear,
and help me
to get
'em in.
There are no men folk at home,
only Mother,
and they'll be lost if we don't mind."
He set himself
to assist,
and dodged this way and that over the potato rows and the cabbages.
Every now and then they ran together,
when he caught her
for a moment an kissed her.
The first pig was got back promptly;
the second
with some difficulty;
the third a long-legged creature,
was more obstinate and agile.
He plunged through a hole in the garden hedge,
and into the lane.
"He'll be lost if I don't follow
'n!"
said she.
"Come along
with me!"
She rushed in full pursuit out of the garden,
Jude alongside her,
barely contriving
to keep the fugitive in sight.
Occasionally they would shout
to some boy
to stop the animal,
but he always wriggled past and ran on as before.
"Let me take your hand,
darling,"
said Jude.
"You are getting out of breath."
She gave him her now hot hand
with apparent willingness,
and they trotted along together.
"This comes of driving
'em home,"
she remarked.
"They always know the way back if you do that.
They ought
to have been carted over."
By this time the pig had reached an unfastened gate admitting
to the open down,
across which he sped
with all the agility his little legs afforded.
As soon as the pursuers had entered and ascended
to the top of the high ground it became apparent that they would have
to run all the way
to the farmer's if they wished
to get at him.
From this summit he could be seen as a minute speck,
following an unerring line towards his old home.
"It is no good!"
cried Arabella.
"He'll be there long before we get there.
It don't matter now we know he's not lost or stolen on the way.
They'll see it is ours,
and send un back.
Oh dear,
how hot I be!"
Without relinquishing her hold of Jude's hand she swerved aside and flung herself down on the sod under a stunted thorn,
precipitately pulling Jude on
to his knees at the same time.
"Oh,
I ask pardon--I nearly threw you down,
didn't I! But I am so tired!"
She lay supine,
and straight as an arrow,
on the sloping sod of this hill-top,
gazing up into the blue miles of sky,
and still retaining her warm hold of Jude's hand.
He reclined on his elbow near her.
"We've run all this way
for nothing,"
she went on,
her form heaving and falling in quick pants,
her face flushed,
her full red lips parted,
and a fine dew of perspiration on her skin.
"Well--why don't you speak,
deary?"
"I'm blown too.
It was all up hill."
They were in absolute solitude--the most apparent of all solitudes,
that of empty surrounding space.
Nobody could be nearer than a mile
to them without their seeing him.
They were,
in fact,
on one of the summits of the county,
and the distant landscape around Christminster could be discerned from where they lay.
But Jude did not think of that then.
"Oh,
I can see such a pretty thing up this tree,"
said Arabella.
"A sort of a--caterpillar,
of the most loveliest green and yellow you ever came across!"
"Where?"
said Jude,
sitting up.
"You can't see him there--you must come here,"
said she.
He bent nearer and put his head in front of hers.
"No--I can't see it,"
he said.
"Why,
on the limb there where it branches off--close
to the moving leaf--there!"
She gently pulled him down beside her.
"I don't see it,"
he repeated,
the back of his head against her cheek.
"But I can,
perhaps,
standing up."
He stood accordingly,
placing himself in the direct line of her gaze.
"How stupid you are!"
she said crossly,
turning away her face.
"I don't care
to see it,
dear:
why should I?"
he replied looking down upon her.
"Get up,
Abby."
"Why?"
"I want you
to let me kiss you.
I've been waiting
to ever so long!"
She rolled round her face,
remained a moment looking deedily aslant at him;
then
with a slight curl of the lip sprang
to her feet,
and exclaiming abruptly
"I must mizzle!"
walked off quickly homeward.
Jude followed and rejoined her.
"Just one!"
he coaxed
"Shan't!"
she said He,
surprised:
"What's the matter?"
She kept her two lips resentfully together,
and Jude followed her like a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him,
talking calmly on indifferent subjects,
and always checking him if he tried
to take her hand or clasp her waist.
Thus they descended
to the precincts of her father's homestead,
and Arabella went in,
nodding good-bye
to him
with a supercilious,
affronted air.
"I expect I took too much liberty
with her,
somehow,"
Jude said
to himself,
as he withdrew
with a sigh and went on
to Marygreen.
On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella's home was,
as usual,
the scene of a grand weekly cooking,
the preparation of the special Sunday dinner.
Her father was shaving before a little glass hung on the mullion of the window,
and her mother and Arabella herself were shelling beans hard by.
A neighbour passed on her way home from morning service at the nearest church,
and seeing Donn engaged at the window
with the razor,
nodded and came in.
She at once spoke playfully
to Arabella:
"I zeed
'ee running with
'un--hee-hee! I hope
'tis coming
to something?"
Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her face without raising her eyes.
"He's
for Christminster,
I hear,
as soon as he can get there."
"Have you heard that lately--quite lately?"
asked Arabella
with a jealous,
tigerish indrawing of breath.
"Oh no! But it has been known a long time that it is his plan.
He's on'y waiting here
for an opening.
Ah well:
he must walk about
with somebody,
I s'pose.
Young men don't mean much now-a-days.
'Tis a sip here and a sip there with
'em.
'Twas different in my time."
When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly
to her mother:
"I want you and Father
to go and inquire how the Edlins be,
this evening after tea.
Or no--there's evening service at Fensworth-- you can walk
to that."
"Oh?
What's up to-night,
then?"
"Nothing.
Only I want the house
to myself.
He's shy;
and I can't get un
to come in when you are here.
I shall let him slip through my fingers if I don't mind,
much as I care for
'n!"
"If it is fine we med as well go,
since you wish."
In the afternoon Arabella met and walked
with Jude,
who had now
for weeks ceased
to look into a book of Greek,
Latin,
or any other tongue.
They wandered up the slopes till they reached the green track along the ridge,
which they followed
to the circular British earth-bank adjoining,
Jude thinking of the great age of the trackway,
and of the drovers who had frequented it,
probably before the Romans knew the country.
Up from the level lands below them floated the chime of church bells.
Presently they were reduced
to one note,
which quickened,
and stopped.
"Now we'll go back,"
said Arabella,
who had attended
to the sounds.
Jude assented.
So long as he was near her he minded little where he was.
When they arrived at her house he said lingeringly:
"I won't come in.
Why are you in such a hurry
to go in to-night?
It is not near dark."
"Wait a moment,"
said she.
She tried the handle of the door and found it locked.
"Ah--they are gone
to church,"
she added.
And searching behind the scraper she found the key and unlocked the door.
"Now,
you'll come in a moment?"
she asked lightly.
"We shall be all alone."
"Certainly,"
said Jude
with alacrity,
the case being unexpectedly altered.
Indoors they went.
Did he want any tea?
No,
it was too late:
he would rather sit and talk
to her.
She took off her jacket and hat,
and they sat down--naturally enough close together.
"Don't touch me,
please,"
she said softly.
"I am part egg-shell.
Or perhaps I had better put it in a safe place."
She began unfastening the collar of her gown.
"What is it?"
said her lover.
"An egg--a cochin's egg.
I am hatching a very rare sort.
I carry it about everywhere
with me,
and it will get hatched in less than three weeks."
"Where do you carry it?"
"Just here."
She put her hand into her bosom and drew out the egg,
which was wrapped in wool,
outside it being a piece of pig's bladder,
in case of accidents.
Having exhibited it
to him she put it back,
"Now mind you don't come near me.
I don't want
to get it broke,
and have
to begin another."
"Why do you do such a strange thing?"
"It's an old custom.
I suppose it is natural
for a woman
to want
to bring live things into the world."
"It is very awkward
for me just now,"
he said,
laughing.
"It serves you right.
There--that's all you can have of me"
She had turned round her chair,
and,
reaching over the back of it,
presented her cheek
to him gingerly.
"That's very shabby of you!"
"You should have catched me a minute ago when I had put the egg down! There!"
she said defiantly,
"I am without it now!"
She had quickly withdrawn the egg a second time;
but before he could quite reach her she had put it back as quickly,
laughing
with the excitement of her strategy.
Then there was a little struggle,
Jude making a plunge
for it and capturing it triumphantly.
Her face flushed;
and becoming suddenly conscious he flushed also.
They looked at each other,
panting;
till he rose and said:
"One kiss,
now I can do it without damage
to property;
and I'll go!"
But she had jumped up too.
"You must find me first!"
she cried.
Her lover followed