Jude the Obscure E-book

                               1895
                         JUDE THE OBSCURE

                          by Thomas Hardy









Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                      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 her as she withdrew. It was now dark inside the
room,
and the window being small he could not discover for a long time
what had become of her, till a laugh revealed her to have rushed
up the stairs, whither Jude rushed at her heels.



                        IX


IT was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatisfied;
she was always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.

One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she
had grown
brighter. That evening she kept an appointment with Jude, who
seemed sad.

"I am going away," he said to her. "I think I ought to go. 
I think it will be better both for you and for me. I wish
some things had never begun! I was much to blame, I know. 
But it is never too late to mend."

Arabella began to cry. "How do you know it is not too late?"
she said. "That's all very well to say! I haven't told you yet!"
and she looked into his face with streaming eyes.

"What?" he asked, turning pale. "Not... ?"

"Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?"

"Oh, Arabella- how can you say that, my dear! You _know_ I
wouldn't
desert you!"

"Well then-"

"I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should
have thought of this before.... But, of course if that's the case,
we must marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of
doing?"

"I thought- I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the
more
for that, and leave me to face it alone!"

"You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago,
or even three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up
of my plans- I mean my plans before I knew you, my dear. 
But what are they, after all! Dreams about books, and degrees,
and impossible fellowships, and all that. Certainly we'll marry: 
we must!"

That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark
self-communing. He
knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that
Arabella
was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind. Yet, such
being
the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who
had
drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had
done,
he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the
consequences. 
For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. 
His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella
herself,
he sometimes said laconically.

The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. 
The people of the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley
was. 
All his reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell
his
books to buy saucepans. Those who guessed the probable state of
affairs,
Arabella's parents being among them, declared that it was the sort
of conduct they would have expected of such an honest young man as
Jude
in reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent sweetheart. 
The parson who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too. 
And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore
that at every other time of their lives till death took them,
they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they
had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. 
What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that
nobody
seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Fawley's aunt being a baker she made him a bride-cake, saying
bitterly that it was the last thing she could do for him,
poor silly fellow; and that it would have been far better if,
instead of his living to trouble her, he had gone underground years
before with his father and mother. Of this cake Arabella took
some slices, wrapped them up in white note-paper, and sent them
to her companions in the pork-dressing business, Anny and Sarah,
labelling each packet _"In remembrance of good advice."_

The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not very
brilliant
even to the most sanguine mind. He, a stone-mason's apprentice,
nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till he should be
out of his time. His wife was absolutely useless in a
town-lodging,
where he at first had considered it would be necessary for them to
live. 
But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so little a degree
caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between the Brown
House
and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a vegetable
garden,
and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep a pig. 
But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it
was a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. 
Arabella, however, felt that all these make-shifts were temporary;
she had gained a husband; that was the thing- a husband with a lot
of earning power in him for buying her frocks and hats when he
should begin to get frightened a bit, and stick to his trade,
and throw aside those stupid books for practical undertakings.

So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage,
giving up his old room at his aunt's- where so much of the hard
labour at Greek and Latin had been carried on.

A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long
tail of hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob
at the back of her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out,
and hung upon the looking-glass which he had bought her.

"What- it wasn't your own?" he said, with a sudden distaste for
her.

"Oh no- it never is nowadays with the better class."

"Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is
supposed
to be different. Besides, you've enough of your own, surely?"

"Yes, enough as country notions go. But in town the men expect
more,
and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham-"

"Barmaid at Aldbrickham?"

"Well, not exactly barmaid- I used to draw the drink at
a public-house there- just for a little time; that was all. 
Some people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a
fancy. 
The more you have the better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town
than all your Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false
hair- 
the barber's assistant told me so."

Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be
true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated
girls would and did go to towns and remain there for years without
losing their simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas,
had an instinct towards artificiality in their very blood,
and became adepts in counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. 
However, perhaps there was no great sin in a woman adding to her
hair,
and he resolved to think no more of it.

A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few
weeks,
even though the prospects of the house-hold ways and means are
cloudy. 
There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to
her
acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of
facts,
and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.

Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one
market-day
with this quality in her carriage when she met Anny her former
friend,
whom she had not seen since the wedding.

As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to
them
without saying it.

"So it turned out a good plan, you see!" remarked the girl to the
wife. 
"I knew it would with such as him. He's a dear good fellow, and
you
ought to be proud of un."

"I am," said Mrs. Fawley quietly.

"And when do you expect?"

"Ssh! Not at all."

"What!"

"I was mistaken."

"Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that's
clever- 
it's a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o',
wi'
all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the real
thing- 
not that one could sham it!"

"Don't you be too quick to cry sham! 'Twasn't sham. I didn't
know."

"My word- won't he be in a taking! He'll give it to 'ee o'
Saturday nights! Whatever it was, he'll say it was a trick- 
a double one, by the Lord!"

"I'll own to the first, but not to the second.... Pooh- 
he won't care! He'll be glad I was wrong in what I said. 
He'll shake down, bless 'ee- men always do. What can 'em do
otherwise? 
Married is married."

Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella
approached
the time when in the natural course of things she would have to
reveal that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. 
The occasion was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their
chamber in the lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked
home
from his work every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve
hours,
and had retired to rest before his wife. When she came into the
room
he was between sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her
undressing before the little looking-glass as he lay.

One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. 
Her face being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive
that she was amusing herself by artificially producing in each
cheek the dimple before alluded to, a curious accomplishment
of which she was mistress, effecting it by a momentary suction. 
It seemed to him for the first time that the dimples were far
oftener
absent from her face during his intercourse with her nowadays than
they
had been in the earlier weeks of their acquaintance.

"Don't do that, Arabella!" he said suddenly. "There is no harm
in it, but- I don't like to see you."

She turned and laughed. "Lord, I didn't know you were awake!"
she said. "How countrified you are! That's nothing."

"Where did you learn it?"

"Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble
when I
was at the public-house; but now they won't. My face was fatter
then."

"I don't care about dimples. I don't think they improve a woman- 
particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you."

"Most men think otherwise."

"I don't care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?"

"I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room."


"Ah- that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about
the
adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday
evening. I
thought when I married you that you had always lived in your
father's house."

"You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little
more finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. 
There was not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so
I
went away for three months."

"You'll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won't you?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why, of course- little things to make."

"Oh."

"When will it be? Can't you tell me exactly, instead of in such
general terms as you have used?"

"Tell you?"

"Yes- the date."

"There's nothing to tell. I made a mistake."

"What?"

"It was a mistake."

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. "How can that be?"

"Women fancy wrong things sometimes."

"But- ! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick
of furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn't have hurried
on our affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I
was ready, if it had not been for the news you gave me, which made
it necessary to save you, ready or no.... Good God!"

"Don't take on, dear. What's done can't be undone."

"I have no more to say!"

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence
between them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a
different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to
accept
her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise
while ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes
involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one
opportunity of showing him